Aging at Home is Expensive!
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https://www.wsj.com/personal-finance/caregiving-aging-at-home-retirement-103520c7
... The 2023 national median cost of a home health aide, hired through an agency, stood at $33 an hour, up from $20 an hour in 2015, according to Genworth, a long-term-care insurance company. Those needing round-the-clock in-home care can expect a median cost of about $290,000, which is more than double the annual median cost of a private room in a nursing home facility and four times the annual median cost of a private room in assisted living, according to Genworth.
For comparison, the median hourly wage in the USA was just a bit over $18 in 2022, median household income is around $75k. It would take four median household incomes to afford one median round-the-clock in-home care.
And then there is all that stress and loss-of-freedom experienced by family members that cannot be easily translated into monetary terms.
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This is my nightmare.
Non-paywall version.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/other/the-crushing-financial-burden-of-aging-at-home/ar-AA1q0WVc
@Quirt-Evans said in Aging at Home is Expensive!:
This is my nightmare.
Mine, too.
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I have been thinking about this for a long time. My somewhat sketchy plan is that our next house is going to be in a college town and will have a caregiver's apartment or suite, so that I can exchange housing for caregiving. Or, we'll move to a community that has nonprofit agencies that provide such care. For example, I was reading about a Jewish organization in the Berkshires that provides aging at home services to its community members.
I don't want to end up like my MIL--she spent the last five of her 95 years in bed, with 24-hour in-home nursing care, and it cost an absolute fortune. At the time, her children did the calculus and it was still cheaper than a nursing home.
Mr Pique has always said he'll walk off a cliff before he will live like that. I'm starting to have the same idea.
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On average a person works 40 hours a week, but "round-the-clock in-home care" means 24x7=168 hours a week of dedicated labor, more than 4x of the typical 40-hour work week. IOW, it takes four people's labor to provide for one person's "round-the-clock in-home care." Of course it's expensive!
At scale, few societies can ever afford this with human labor.
It will be a long while before robots become advanced enough to be competent caregivers. May take longer still to transfer our consciousness into machines so we don't have to age in decrepit biological bodies.
Interim solutions are centralization/statistical multiplexing like nursing homes and having most people dying quickly as to not need round-the-clock care for long once they started needing "round-the-clock care.
Centralization/statistical multiplexing means giving up "in-home" care. The "die quickly" option also has its shortcomings. From a public policy perspective, support legal euthanasia to make the "die quickly" option more palatable, especially if you want such on option to preserve some dignity.
