No Long Term Care Insurance and the Great Family Divide

Robert C. was a 92 year old farmer who lived in a small community in South Dakota.  His wife died 4 years before him.  He died this year.  He had five living children, three boys and two girls.  Two of the boys lived near him, as did one girl.  The two boys were also farmers and lived just a few miles from Robert, as did the girl, who was married to a farmer.  One boy lived in Chicago and the other girl lived in Kansas City.

Robert was raised in a family of nine brothers and sisters and all came of age in the1920’s and 1930’s.  Life was not easy for them as they grew up, with little money, but they pulled together, supported each other over the years, and eventually all became relatively wealthy.  When talking with Robert he obsessed about the hard times he experienced during the Great Depression and how today’s people don’t appreciate what they’ve got.  Robert was like a lot of people who were raised in those days.  He was exempted from the draft in WWII because he was a farmer and had five children.  Two of his brothers served in the Army.

Life went well for Robert and his family as he and his wife entered their eighties.  Both were in reasonably good health, had good relations with their children, who visited them quite frequently.  Robert had good health insurance based on years of service on his local Co-op Board and through Lutheran Brotherhood. When he or any member of his family became ill his insurance and personal wealth was able to comfortably take care of the costs. He had no long term care insurance, because he’d been so healthy all his life and he figured he’d never need it.  Besides he had enough money to take care of all his foreseeable needs.
His wife died suddenly from a heart attack at age 89.  Robert, who was now beginning to have heart, hearing, vision, hip, and knee problems, was now losing his independence, and relied on his two sons and daughter who lived nearby to provide him with long term care.  To improve his mobility he had knee replacement surgery, which went well, but because it was initially so painful, he refused to have the other replaced.  His mobility decreased severely.  His hearing worsened, so he got hearing aids, but quit using them because he said they didn’t help.  When people visited him they had to holler and repeat themselves to be understood, which would wear them out, so they didn’t visit him as frequently as they used to.  His sons and daughter hired caretakers to keep house and prepare meals, but there began to be disagreements among them about the people they hired.  These caretakers were untrained, local woman who were doing this work to supplement their meager incomes in their advancing years.  Some did not have good attitudes about their situation and would passively take it out on Robert, but hide their behavior from his children.  Finding good long term care help can be hard especially in small town inwhich Robert lived in.

On one occasion a considerable sum of money disappeared from Robert’s bedroom and the caretaker was suspected.  The daughter defended the caretaker, because she knew her well and had been the one who hired her.  The two brothers accused the caretaker, which caused division with their sister.  Complicating the whole matter was the fact that all sorts of people were in and out of his house, including numerous friends and relatives, any one of which could have taken the money.

The son and daughter who lived elsewhere would visit as often as they could, but were of little help  with his everyday affairs, which soon led to resentments from the brothers, who felt they were doing all the work and the others ought to disrupt their lives to help them out caring for Robert.  It wasn’t long before everyone was somewhat alienated from each other, with Robert anxious about the situation, seeing all that he and his wife had built up over the years, deteriorating in front of him. Soon there began to be squabbles about his will and the distribution of his property among the children and grandchildren.  Meanwhile Robert’s health continued to decline, but the children all wanted to keep him out of a nursing home and to remain in his own home, so he had to spend more of his personal fortune to do this.  The last two years he spent down most of his cash reserves, with the farm property being all that was left.  And when he finally died, there was considerable difficulty and pain in the division of the property.  It was impossible to divide it equitably, so there remains resentment among the children to this day.

If Robert had had a good long term care insurance plan much of this difficulty could have been avoided.  A big part of Robert’s and his children’s problems was that they were all very thrifty people and didn’t want to spend the money they’d spent years of hard work accumulating.  So they hired people who were sub-standard by health care standards—good people but inexperienced and untrained in dealing with the severely and chronically ill.  With good long term care insurance they could have hired professional caretakers, who would have required higher salaries, but could have given better care, and his personal funds would have been protected.

The squabbling over the money that was depleted meant that for the brother and sister who lived away there could be little payout to them from the will, without selling the farm property and dividing it equally, because Robert insisted the farm be kept in the family, so the two local brothers got the bulk of the estate. Needless to say there are still resentments over all this.

One might say that love and concern should have overcome all these issues, and in some rare cases that is so. But experience shows that people spend considerable portions of their lives working hard to earn enough money and other property so they can meet their needs and accomplish their goals.  So when people are very concerned about money and property, they are defending huge portions of their hard labor—and time.  And the older we get, time becomes even more valuable.  And good financial planning, of which long term care insurance is a vital part, encourages better health and the preservation of our very lives.

Long Term Care Insurance is not the right fit for everyone, but for people who have assets to protect and want to ensure quality care during their retirement it might be worth a look.  If you'd like to learn more please take a few minutes and fill in the quote request below.  Either way, thank you very much for reading today's blog.