caring for the elderly
Millions of middle aged Americans who love their elderly parents are silently losing their savings and other assets to help take care of them.
The government should help take care of the many instead of enriching the few who don’t need it. We are the only industrial nation that doesn’t provide healthcare for all.
Why do we ignore the promise of LIFE, LIBERTY AND THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS?
The following article reveals what is going on quietly with those who care enough about others that they are willing to lose everything.
Elder-Care Costs Deplete Savings of a Generation
By JANE GROSS
To care for her ailing 97-year-old father over the past three years, Elizabeth Rodriguez, a vice president at the Federal Reserve Bank in New York, has borrowed against her 401(k) retirement plan, sold her house on Staten Island and depleted nearly 20 years of savings.
The money has gone to lawyers’ fees ($50,000) to win a contested guardianship. It has gone for home-care equipment like the mattress for his hospital bed (about $3,000 in all) and for a food service to deliver meals ($400 a month).
It has gone for a two-bedroom rental apartment big enough for herself, her dad and a home aide ($1,600 a month more than a one-bedroom apartment in the same building), and for a wheelchair-accessible van to get him to doctors’ appointments ($330 a trip).
Asked to tally the costs, Ms. Rodriguez, 58, said she had no idea how much she was spending. “A shower chair, body cream with no alcohol, new shoes,” she said. “You don’t stop and calculate. You just buy what you have to buy.”
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