Longterm holistic approach on health(care) without reliance on social security

[Ego]

If the need arose, where do you see yourself as an elder in need of more support?

This is something everyone in their fifties should be thinking about now. We don't necessarily need to take any actions. I just think it is a good idea to tune into the options and solutions available. Understanding how the system works can be invaluable.

In his journal, Tom Young talked about how he and his wife prepared. They believed themselves to be relatively poor.
viewtopic.php?t=5521

A while back I mentioned a friend who entered a CCRC (Continuous Care Retirement Community) with his wife. She was a hospice nurse, is incredibly smart and knows how to navigate the system. They moved to a non-profit place that promises to take care of them for the rest of their lives, even if they run out of funds.
viewtopic.php?p=271596#p271596

[7Wannabe5]

If the need arose, where do you see yourself as an elder in need of more support?

Well, my three younger sisters and I are trying to establish a multi-generational retreat/recreation footprint in the realm where we have always vacationed together. Our rough somewhat joking plan is that we will all live together, each with different body parts gone decrepit, after all our men have died off. This plan also envisions the likelihood of a theoretical-not-yet-born scruffy 19 year old grand-nephew/niece/child or two crashed out on sabbatical year, smoking pot and making art in the tiny apartment above the garage barn, in exchange for hauling in our firewood. Or something like that.

Also, both of my adult children are quite fond of me as a human as well as a mother, and my DD32 is by nature one of the most conscientious Level Green/Yellow humans imaginable. And, I plan on maintaining/expanding my polyamorous circle of intermittently-useful-although-grouchy-old-men and/or finding more communal living arrangement in the city with non-related others in addition to northern rural communal plan with related others . So, I'm hopefully going to be more complex-social-web covered at Level Blue merging into Green/Yellow than many of my peers or even many of my mother's peers who find themselves alone with Level Orange offspring busy/distant and just one husband dying first.

What do you mean by, “better able to speak the language of the most educated” in regards to your high net worth friend receiving better medical care? I don’t think that being consistently grouchy facilitates good relationships of any kind. Was there even more to the issue?

Oh, just that in addition to being extremely irascible, he could also be quite crass in his commentary. I wouldn't be entirely surprised if a young nurse arranged for him to receive "extra" sedatives. I like eccentrics, but others not so much. Also, he wanted to understand modern science, because he was a follower of "Intelligent Investor" practice, but he wasn't really keeping up at age 80. And he was in many oddly mixed ways on the err-towards-miser side of frugal practice.

[Frita]

The latest in the long-term care insurance: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/15/your ... worth.html

My mom has been paying Genworth premiums for more than 30 years. Attempting to have conversations with her about this goes in circles. (Does that count as nowhere?) I don’t even know for which option she will pony up. Currently, she wants to stay in her home and “ride or die” in the land of denial. I am continuing to accept things as they are. At some point, I may need to take action. Now is not that time. I feel sad because I’d prefer something different on multiple levels.

[7Wannabe5]

So much of the care provided in nursing homes is so basic, I think a great solution for seniors who want to stay in their own homes would be to double or triple up with other seniors and also chip in for live-in or full-time help. The obvious problem with this solution is that humans in our culture tend to get more, rather than less, set in the ways they want their household to run with age. For instance, my mother has always been obsessed with interior decoration, so she will use up 2 hours of the 4 hours of housekeeping services she is paying for twice a week, making the poor individual under her employ hang artwork just so, or unpacking from Amazon boxes, and arranging 20 dangerous candles and 3 dangerous for person with walker throw rugs, instead of maybe cleaning out the fridge or even mopping the kitchen floor. I keep trying to explain to her that a professional cleaning person just wants to do their job vs. being the micro-managed arms and legs for her cuckoo-bananas decorating projects, but to no avail. My sisters and I are thrown too hard back to our childhood when we have to deal with her bi-polar hamster mess of broken jar of pickles on kitchen floor, three overloaded trash bins, and giant tangle of embroidery thread embedded with some sort of sticky medication on the side table (which is actually a bird-bath she ordered online) to her liftchair which she thinks is broken, because it came unplugged.

Sure sign that I am still a bit reactive to her flavor of bi-polar behavior is that the small apartment I am living in is practically empty/bare although I've been here two years.

[zbigi]

I don't know if it's popular in US, but in Europe elderly people quite often get a live-in help just for themselves (no pooling with other elders). It's usually an immigrant from another country, because the citizen of your own country would command a small fortune to agree for such semi-slavery arrangement - they usually only have a couple hours off per week (say, a Sunday afternoon), and are otherwise expected to be 24/7 on location. Usually, they're on fixed-term contracts, after which they return to their home country to rest and recuperate. This means constantly rotating care for the elders, which is way less than ideal, but most people still prefer it to nursing home.

[mathiverse]

There are senior homesharing programs in the United States which are more like working for room and/or board with varying levels of commitment/work required by the younger person helping the older person. You can get really good deals like my friend whose main work requirement was spending time with the older person via playing board games a few hours a week on top of a few chores.

[IlliniDave]

Nothing novel in my approach.

Starts with striving for a healthy/active lifestyle, something I've improved greatly in the last 12 months. If I was inclined, I could probably have started on at least 3 prescription meds last year at this time but I was able to remove the "need" through lifestyle updates. That also removes drug side effects from the list of things to combat.

It's difficult for a lifelong W-2 wage earner over age 65 in the US to avoid Medicare. I've still got some years to go but I expect to purchase some amount of Medicare supplementation, likely through my former employer who has a decent affordable group plan for retirees. I've got a modest HSA accumulated. And I sized my stash to withstand stress tests against max ACA Silver max OOP expenses every year, to Medicare and beyond. So I can brute force it to a certain extent.

Although I tend to push back against the system in some ways, like attacking root causes rather than settling for the management of symptoms, I still expect to operate largely within it.