Yvonne Abraham, writing in the Boston Globe, calls for sweeping changes in the way the healthcare system treats aging people and the caregivers who support them. She tells the story of Virginia O’Connor, a woman whose mother with Alzheimer’s didn’t qualify for the services she needed because she didn’t want to living in a nursing home, assisted living center or hospital.

Ultimately, O’Connor found help for her mother — for fees of up to $650 per month that she had to pay out of her own pocket.

Many others can’t afford these services. Amazingly, they are not covered by insurance.

Which is ludicrous when you consider how much more expensive it is to provide an elderly person with a hospital bed — on average about $20,000 per stay — than it is to provide this kind of support, which can help avoid the hospital.

But the whole crazy system is weighted toward the expensive business of managing crises, and not prevention – even though the latter ultimately costs less.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 1st, 2008 at 9:01 am and is filed under caregivers, elderly, health aides/direct support workers, health care, insurance. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.