On a walk in the park, she fell face first and broke her nose.
In the middle of the night, she tried to get to the bathroom but fell and crashed through closet doors.
Multiple infections, along with heart and kidney disease, landed her in the hospital, where her dementia raged and she didn’t always recognize loved ones.
My mother is in the waiting room now, the one we’re all headed to, millions and millions of boomers on the march. My father walked this way, too, before his death almost five years ago.
Dr. Bruce Chernof of the nonprofit Senior Care Action Network Foundation (SCAN) said the country needs to urgently reconsider the state of elder care.
“Our healthcare system was purposely built for a different time and place,” Chernof said.
Average life expectancy was 69 in 1955, “so people expected to live four years beyond Medicare.” As for Medicaid, he said, “nobody expected it to be the primary payer for long-term care as it now is.”
Chernof recommends a transformation of care, and a more cost-effective redistribution of public funds.
“When you look at us compared to every other industrialized country in the world, we’ve spent far more on acute medical services and far less on community-based and home support services,” said Chernof.
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