Reply to I didn't fully comprehend the cost of eldercare

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Yeah what do families do when the money runs out?

The next generation goes into debt?[/quote]

The elderly person goes on Medicaid and into a Medicaid bed in a nursing home.[/quote]

Except if you are cheating the system, you have to have basically no money (I forget but I think it was a $2K limit and you can only keep about $75 a month of your social security check).  We had to do it for my MIL and it was less than ideal and few good nursing homes take it.  It is good when the money runs out but I'd rather spend the money and have someone well cared for.[/quote]

This blew my mind when I first had to deal with (the prospect of) it. My father lived in Alaska, where the *average* nursing home monthly fee is $27K a year. Assisted living isn't much better. He had a pension AND good long term care insurance AND a small inheritance from my grandmother and we were still realistically giving him around 2-3 years at a nursing home after the LTC ran out before he'd wind up on medicaid. He had a serious medical condition, lived alone, and I lived in DC.  He couldn't travel.

He died about a year before we really needed to encounter the Medicaid spend-down period. Trust me, I did not relish the idea of him burning through $27K a month before we would need to move him into one of the rare medicaid beds at the crappier Medicaid facility. And it's not like his quality of life was amazing -- he was basically wheeled from his bed to a television room and back.

And people wonder what happens to "generational wealth." [/quote]

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