Okay, please explain to me again how privatizing everything makes all our lives better? I just finished watching again on youtube Bill Maher's interview of libertarian Ron Paul, and all I can think of is, what a whited sepulchre and moron.
Privatization is completely amoral. Investors don't care about your m-in-law, or anybody else's. The bottom line is the only thing that matters.
As the great Nero Wolfe used to say:
"Phooey!!!"
One hopes Grover Norquist has to spend time in a nursing home (or has to face a close relative in one). Maybe he'll realize then that government *does* have a place.
I watched my grandmother wither away and die in a privately-run nursing home. I couldn't do anything about it, because her power of attorney was held by one of my uncles (her youngest son). I consider it karma that he died shortly after she did.
LM, Very moving, thanks.
*sigh*
great piece as always, LM, but it makes me sad because it reminds me of 2 things:
--Gilly in the hospital and
--my own Mom saying stuff like "I hope that I just fall over dead, or if something bad happens to me, that I have a chance to just take every pill in the house or something."
A sad state of the union as it were...
The Service Corporation International (SCI) buyout of small funeral homes (and associated major scandals) has been heavily underreported. Bush has been closely linked with them since he was governor of Texas. They got the no-bid contract (via their subsidiary Kenyon International) to dispose of the dead after Katrina.
I hated those medic runs taking patients in and out of nursing homes. Absolutely positively hated them.
Some of them were horrors I won't describe. Other nursing homes were alright.
Some were name-brand HMOs -- going to their ERs for emergencies in my experience was a fast way to die; I do not have statistics to back this interpretation up. But we always took critical patients to non-HMO hospitals if there was any way we could jigger the system to let us. -- and the privatized nursing homes of the name-brand HMOs were always trying to cut costs on the backs and bedsores of their patients. Always. Managed care means pain for real people, every time.
The VA -- I don't remember if it has its own nursing homes, but I remember taking vets in and out of the VA hospitals and clinics, back and forth from their homes. I always try to treat people with respect, but I tried extra hard with vets.
It's so, so hard sometimes, precisely as LM describes it. All that's left is a body. The human part has left, and all that may be is left is the biology, tick tick ticking, ticking away, pissing, shitting, sweating, bleeding, delicate skin ripping off so easily, almost just with a look, certainly with a touch when you move her or him to the gurney, your great-grand-papa or grandma lying there, eyes focused into a world long lost, stiff, pale, a body waiting to die, just a fragile bag of water covered in skin and dusty hair.
We all deserve better.
Everyone should be left at the end of their lives (and in the middle, and near the start) knowing they've been taken care of.
I've had the horrifying experience of visiting a couple of nursing homes during my college years sometime deep into the last century, and could not abide the old folks tied to beds with rolled up sheets begging me to get them out of there. I visited an old aunt of my girlfriend's in a similar home in the small south Netherlands city of Breda, and it was a totally different, much cleaner, much happier world. Of course the Breda facility was run (gasp!) by the government.
I read this article, Escape From the Nursing Home, when it was first published. Maybe we need to revive the idea of a commune, with some privacy.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/
1...17rosofsky.html
Jen, I understand where your mom's coming from. One of my best friends is dealing with his mom's late stage Alzheimers. She's pretty healthy, other than having Alzheimers, and has lived (if you can call it that) for much longer than he and his siblings expected. Personally, I stock up on good street drugs or something while I still have enough functioning brain cells. I can't expect my nephews to take care of me.
Here we go again; fucking Hell-O-Scam ate the first try.
This is why I will make no great effort to extend my life span.
It just occurred to me; maybe the soulless sunzabitches who misrule this country WANT us peasants to feel this way, so we'll die earlier and leave more tax money for sweetheart no-bid contracts and tax cuts for fat cats?
May the 2008 elections bring the late Hunter S. Thompson's "Million Pound Shithammer" down on the Radical Right.
so where do i find one of these hell holes, my dad is going to work till he dies(or die as soon as hes done working, hes one of those types). If i kind find a nice hell on earth to drop my step mother in I would be rather happy.
My advice is to save up money. Lots of it. For private 24 hour care at home it costs about 300-450 a day (depending on the level of care and whether or not its a couple.) Thats just for a person to come provide care. Not counting rent, food etc.
Thats 146000 / year. For a person with alzheimers, over, say 8 years, thats over a million bucks. Not including medical care. We should take care of these people. Medical care, including nursing home care, should not be run like a business because health outcomes and quality of life is as important as the bottom line in these situations.
Also, the price of private and nursing care will go way up in 10 years, as baby boomers retire and the supply of qualified nurses and nursing assistants goes down.
Also life expectancy will go up as medical technology gets better, which means more dementia.
Eventually we need to get away from the idea that life expectency is the end all of medical care. We can't live forever, and using our medical technology to draw out the decline of the elderly creates a lot of unneeded suffering.
Eventually this will destroy the middle class. People who would of passed their money to their kids willmspend it on dragging out their own deaths instead. This is already starting to happen.
I grew up across the street from a place just like you described. I've known all my life what death smells like. Luckily, my grandmother spent her last 5 or 6 years in a really wonderful home, with a very caring staff.
You guys are doing great work in almost every facet of what it means to be human.
You guys are doing great work in almost every facet of what it means to be human.
JMH -
It is by design.
We have full grown-ups writing. Each of us -- while we all overlap at some level -- bring new areas of concern and taking care to our mutual home.
We are attempting through our editing and writing to create a safe space for people to be themselves, a place where people say, "I'm really taken care of," where GNB is home.
Thank you for being part of GNB.
I'm glad that Grandma doesn't have to go to a place like that. She's 94, and lives in the house that she and Grandpa built 50 years ago. She's in relatively good shape, but I'm still seeing a slow decline from where she was when my wife and I moved in with her three years ago.
>>People who would of passed their money to their kids willmspend it on dragging out their own deaths instead. This is already starting to happen.
tomk, my mom and I have already started to talk about this. my dad is in good shape for now but she's worried about the future. (liver issues). she's calculated the total cost of finding the best specialists and where the best facilities are and she's estimated it will be in the millions. they've paid into the most comprehensive long term care insurance they could find and in turn my siblings and I are also part of that.
they've worked very hard their entire life and they are still working and it's through the grace of G*d that things have worked out, at least so far.
mom: "if there's any money left it's okay if we spend it on keeping your father alive right? you're not going to be mad if there isn't any money left over?"
me: "uh YEAH. you spent your life building your assets, do whatever you want or need to"
mom: "what if we donate to the gov't"
me: "again do whatever you want. not mine to ask for or expect"
I am glad they are fortunate enough to go through everything they own to help themselves. It scares the shit out of our futures, however.
I wanted to also add and emphasize that what they have has as much if not alot to do with timing and luck as it does with "hard work". because the concept of "working hard" is used as a way to denigrate and divide. Luck because they were born into the circumstances that they were despite suffering through a civil war they were educated and educated well and luck b/c it worked out for them despite coming with very little financially.
Commenting by HaloScan
