Living Longer with Long Term Care and the Social Issues

     That woman who was walking down the stairs in her home who slipped and broke her hip in 1975 would have died soon after.  Now modern medicine is keeping people alive longer with a rapid increase in medical technologies.  However, when a person dies slowly the care is often provided by family and friends who will more than likely determine whether an older person can remain at home.  Some statistics:
• 65% of older people with long-term care needs rely solely on family and friends to provide care.
• 35% of older people with long-term care needs will supplement family care with help from paid home health care providers.
• 50% of the elderly who have long-term care needs, but no family support to help care for them, are in nursing homes, while only 7% who have a family caregiver are in institutional settings, such as a nursing home.  More long term care statistics.

Long-Term Care Is a Social Issue and affects everyone in our society, whether it's the psychological toll of seeing a parent die slowly, the physical toll, or financial toll on tax payers that pay for the Medicaid nursing home--long term care affects all of us.  Some key points to consider with long term care being a social issue:
• the high cost of long-term care
• the need for advanced family and financial planning
• the burden of needing long-term care on individuals, families, and society
• concerns about the quality of care an individual is receiving

     We find ourselves facing a complex problem with long-term care, from accessibility to how the care is going to be paid for. The graying of America and the baby-boomer generation, combined with Americans' increased longevity, make Long Term Care a challenging social issue for all.  We are faced with finding a solution to the growing needs of an increasingly elderly population in America.  What can be done?  Adding to the complexity of the long term care issue is the fact that the people that actually need care are not a homogeneous group.  Members of this group who need care are a diverse group of all ranges of ethnic, economic, and educational backgrounds.  Individuals' ages, current health, and family support systems affect their perception of what long-term care is and what type of care they need.  The point is there is no one single answer that is suited to meet the wide range needs of these many, different people.
     The greatest challenges for the health care system will be to maintain services for the uninsured and for patients covered by public programs (Medicaid), which continually deal with fiscal pressures as more and more people dump their problems on the government rather than sacrificing vacations, new cars, etc at the expense of buy health insurance and long-term care insurance themselves.  It's a free lunch mentality that is spreading and people have to realize that Medicaid (government) gets their money from the tax payers through sales, state, local, federal taxes.  In the end we're all paying.  This is why it is so imperative to plan yourself with financial tools such as long term care insurance which will shift the risk from your nest-egg and life's work to an insurance company.

     More and more people are living longer and this trend will continue, as medical advances have increased the number of years we live and have decreased the number of early sudden deaths.  Identifying diseases through simple screening, such as colon cancer, breast cancer, diabetes, hypertension, high cholesterol, and osteoporosis, has helped reduce deaths, but with that increased life span comes the growing need for long term care.
In summary:
• Since people are living longer, they are requiring additional years of care
• Hospital stays are shorter because more services are available at home where people recover quicker

• People are surviving more accidents but not always experiencing full recovery (for example, Christopher Reeve), creating a new group of Long Term Care patients.  See the Christopher Reeve Foundation here foundation here. 

     The problem that research is finding, is that medical advances have increased life expectancy but have not delayed the onset of illness.  This will slow death rates and may actually increase Long Term Care needs.   More people are living long enough to develop age-related conditions such as dementia or Alzheimer's, or they are living longer with existing disabilities such as diabetes and other chronic conditions.  Modern medicine continues to improve through innovation, but there is a cost to that progress.  The irony is that as medical advances help people live longer, the likelihood increases that long-term care will be needed, and the question will remain, unless one plans, how to pay for it?