Join thousands of readers who have reacted to the articles in the “Dying Broke” series about the financial burden of long-term care in the United States. They offered their assessments for the government and market failures that have drained the lifetime savings of so many American families. And some offered possible solutions.
Get insights from more than 4,200 comments where readers shared their struggles in caring for spouses, older parents, and grandparents. They expressed anxieties about getting older themselves and needing help to stay at home or in institutions like nursing homes or assisted living facilities.
Discover the many suggested changes to U.S. policy, like expanding the government’s payments for care and allowing more immigrants to stay in the country to help meet the demand for workers. Some even said they would rather end their lives than become a financial burden to their children.
Blame the predominantly for-profit nature of American medicine and the long-term care industry for depleting the financial resources of older people, leaving the federal-state Medicaid programs to take care of them once they were destitute.
“It is incorrect to say the money isn’t there to pay for elder care,” Jim Castrone, 72, a retired financial controller in Placitas, New Mexico, commented. “It’s there, in the form of profits that accrue to the owners of these facilities.”
Other countries’ treatment of their older citizens was repeatedly mentioned. Readers contrasted the care they observed older people receiving in foreign countries with the treatment in the United States, which spends less on long-term care as a portion of its gross domestic product than do most wealthy nations.
Birgit Rosenberg, a software developer, praised the standard of care for her mother living in a German nursing home versus the care of a friend’s mother in a U.S. » …
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