Adult Day Cares in the Rio Grande Valley(texasobserver.org) |
Adult Day Cares in the Rio Grande Valley(texasobserver.org) |
Over the next 20 years, the number of elderly over the age of 85 is projected to go from 6.4 to 14.6 million. 10% of the population is over 65. That's a lot of people who don't work and need care in the next 2 decades. We are probably going to see a big uptick in Y combinator graduating companies who focus on elderly care.
One interesting bright light is that a lot of the startups targeted towards younger people are actually godsends for senior independence -- grocery delivery, meal delivery, ridesharing. Not to mention how much cheaper it is to order assistive devices -- the very same assistive devices for a quarter of the price -- online vs. the local medical device rental places.
I’m curious about this mindset. Why would you worry about it consuming more time? Isn’t that what family is for?
You can have software that alerts you about care, or tracks progress, or stores patient information, but those things were never the expensive part of elderly care. The expensive part is always going to be paying a person to do X because elderly person can’t do X.
Postpone means "fixing it for now, but not for all time." Fix it for now, then let tomorrow figure out how to postpone it again.
That's only a problem if postponing it involves incurring worse future problems.
It's also worth noting that the elderly have a big chunk of wealth :
https://dqydj.com/the-net-worth-of-different-age-groups-in-a...
I have to believe that a good chunk of Medicare-for-All folks are middle-aged people who see how the over-65s don't worry a whit about how much anything costs, because it's all covered, while younger folks are setting their own broken bones or dying over insulin or going bankrupt due to bike accidents.
Anyway, lesson here is: The +65s vote reliably and politicians allocate benefits accordingly. Dear everyone who is not 65+: please vote.
Visit any poor regions of the world and you'll find there's a lot more emphasis on taking care of the elders regardless of the median number of children per family.
For a variety of reasons, that kind of culture gets wiped out in developed nations, to the detriment of everyone. Outsourcing it out of the family and building a capitalist industry around it is super dystonian yet here we are.
Long experience suggests to me that fixing what can be fixed today makes tomorrow better. What a lot of people scoff at as bandaid solutions are very often perfectly good solutions.
Bandaids need to changed regularly while the wound heals. You don't slap a bandaid on and leave it there forever.
It's only worse than doing nothing if it isn't sterile and thereby introduces infection to the wound.
As long as your metaphorical bandaid solution is sterile, it's probably better than doing nothing.
Sometimes, fixing today is the best way to arrive at a brighter tomorrow.
Technology is helping to address the issue in a way which reduces the need younger labor to care for an aging population while simultaneously improving quality of life for the elderly. Win/Win.
Also, think about where caregivers might have to relocate and how they might alter their futures by spending it caretaking. I have family members who sacrificed a very significant amount of their adult lives taking care of their parents and missed out on their own lives and wrecked their own health doing it (it's hard mental and physical work, and in some cases can be very thankless).
I also know people who gave up everything to take care of their parents and ended up homeless after their deaths.
Why would we expect others to do this work? Or that it would scale to do so?
Women tend to be saddled with caretaking work in a way that can easily be abusive. In some cultures, the social contract is that women get taken care of financially for doing the women's work, but that's not universal.
White American culture can be very ugly about treating women like they are all undeserving, lazy mooches who need a paycheck on top of their obligation to provide care for relatives. Not all subcultures do that.
So it's possible that there are both cultural and gender differences that involve a lot of implicit, baked in assumptions that neither of you are explicitly spelling out in comments and are the source of different viewpoints.
Without addressing such, you may be unable to reach some kind of agreement because you can't even effectively communicate.
I’m not saying it’s easy, by any means. I’m saying it’s necessary, unless you’re financially wealthy enough to outsource all of the support services elder care requires, which most people cannot (I am not at that wealth level, but I can take time off to provide care).
My intent is not to poke at you specifically by any means, but to point out these are systemic problems the country will face as an older generation ages and the wealth doesn’t exist to provide them white glove service until death. The solution is not startups, it’s community and family (along with having enough savings, FMLA, and vacation time).
The linked article seems to suggest that adult day cares actually work best when resources are limited, because they allow older people to be independent for longer (which is good regardless of the resources available):
> When they both retired in 2004, they tried staying at home, but found it hard to manage on their own due to Beatriz’s bad knees, Guillermo’s health woes, including quintuple bypass surgery, and their youngest son Ray’s schizophrenia and depression. > ... > The prevalence of adult day cares in the Valley, which is 90 percent Hispanic, is part cultural, part economic. Hispanic seniors are more likely than Anglos to live at home with their children or other family members. The Valley also has a persistently high poverty rate and a percentage of seniors with diabetes, heart disease, depression and dementia that is alarmingly higher than the national average. > ... > Adult day cares like those in the Valley can offer a kind of middle way between round-the-clock care by family caregivers — who frequently burn out and experience physical and mental problems themselves — and expensive, sometimes impersonal nursing home care.
Ideally, a healthy social contract benefits all involved parties and doesn't sacrifice some particular subgroup so that everyone else can be happy, but they're screwed no matter what they do because all options open to them are horrible.
They would not be in loose loose "we blame you for not choosing this and then blame you for consequences of choosing this" situation.
Most options are poor options, through little fault of the individual. You’re doing the best you can with the hand you’ve been dealt.
When 1+1=3 and you divide the pie such that everyone gets more than they would have on their own, no, it's not all downside and it's not unhealthy.
It's all downside when 1+1=3, but one party consistently gets less than what they would have on their own. Then, why should they go along with this?
That's where you get bitter people.
Edit: For the record, you've done a lot of editing of both of your comments here, which potentially changes how my replies look. I did my best to not personally accuse you of anything and to only state that the way the comment was written was not coming across well.
Your comments stand on their own, and it has been pointed out I have made edits (which I’ve attempted to make in good faith).