Another Personal Long Term Care Story

Last week a very good friend of mine, age 75, fell and broke his hip.  He is now in the hospital, recovering from surgery, and will soon go into a nursing home, where he will remain until he has recovered sufficiently to return to his home.  Unfortunately, he does not have long term care insurance so any care he will needs will be paid out of pocket.

Bill, we will call him, was a traveling salesman.  He covered the whole southeastern United States.  He had had excellent relationships with his customers.  He would get into his car on Sunday evening or Monday morning, and set out on the road to visit his customers, who were orthotic suppliers of artificial arms and legs to patients who had been injured or crippled by disease.  Bill’s customers loved to see him walk thru the door, because he would bring them information and products of all the latest equipment and advances in that industry.

Bill told me many times how he loved being on the road, driving down the Interstates, listening to his books-on-tapes and talking to his customers on his mobile phone.  Then, he always tried to get back home on Thursday to his family, and would do all his paperwork and follow-up on Friday.  With this routine, Bill and his family were quite content.  And he made a very good living.

Then, about fifteen years ago, Bill had an accident.  He was cruising down I-20 in Alabama when he ran into a severe rainstorm and his car started hydroplaning.  He lost control of the car, left the road and crashed head-on into a large tree.  He was banged up severely, breaking both legs below the knees, with many bruises and contusions.  But, after extensive hospital care and surgery, he recovered sufficiently to resume his business activities, though he now walked with a considerable limp.

Bill soon resumed his work activities, but he could no longer participate in other activities that he loved: tennis, hiking, yard work and home repair.  In his youth Bill had been quite an athlete, playing baseball and football, being a halfback in college.

When I retired from my job as a counselor in 2002, Bill and I began the tradition of going out to lunch about once a week.  He was still working, and wanted to keep on doing so as long as he could and spoke fondly of how much he loved “being on the road.”  But I noticed that he was becoming more unsteady on his feet.

There soon followed over the next six years or so several incidents where he fell, sometimes injuring himself and needing medical and/or hospital care.  Once when he and I were exiting a building, walking across a yard, he fell onto the grass, but did not injure himself. But I knew that if we had been on a sidewalk he probably would have hurt himself severely.  That was when I began to have serious concerns about him and advised him to replace his walking cane with a four-legged walker.  But he would have none of that, and continued using his cane.

He has since fallen several more times, with semi-serious injuries to his hands and arms.  However this latest fall, resulting in the broken hip, will probably be the event that confines him to a wheel chair the rest of his life, but this will depend on his recovery process.  If he does not recover he will probably require several years of long term care services.

If Bill is confined to a wheel chair, whether temporarily or permanently, and is able to come back home, which I believe will happen eventually, he and his wife will have problems.  Though he lives in a large, nice home, it will not accommodate a wheelchair-bound person.  They will have to have all sorts of modifications made if they are to remain in their house, which will cost anywhere from  $30,000 to $50,000. Having gone thru such modifications to my home because of my wife’s recent confinement to a wheelchair, I know the potential difficulties they face.  However, I had an ace-in-the-hole that Bill and his wife don’t –long term care insurance which paid for much of our home modifications, as well as the other transitional home health care that we needed.

The moral is this: long term care insurance is great when you need it.  And a high percentage of us will need it as we advance into the so-call “golden years” as modern medicne keeps people alive longer.

Accidents are one of the leading causes of needing long term care and although they can happen to anyone at any age, the elderly face an increased risk of needing long term care because recovering from the accident s can be nearly impossiable.  Planning ahead and buying long term care insurance is not a fun thing to do and I know there are more enjoyable things to spend the money on.  However, if you or a member of your family are faced with needing long term care it can whipe out your entire nest egg.

If you’d like to learn more about long term care insurance and have your quotes mailed to you simply fill in the form below.  Either way, thanks for reading we really appreciate it.