My mom has been in assisted living for a few years and doing reasonably well. After a recent fall, she has not been able to get back to the stable transfers required by assisted living and will stay in long term care at the nursing home. We are lucky it is a great facility and she is very happy with the staff. I knew it would be expensive than AL but it’s still a shock. $13,000/month versus the $8,500 she was paying before. It’s worth it to keep her comfortable and safe and have her needs met without the stress of having to maintain a certain level of function in AL. And I am thankful she can transition to Medicaid when her nest egg runs out. It’s much easier to get a bed there when you still have funds to pay, so I’m glad she is in a stable situation. It would be much more challenging if my dad was still alive and needed that money to fund living independently. He was always in great health and very active until his cancer diagnosis. Just reflecting on how sad it is that without a solid nest egg, the last few weeks would have been so much harder for her. She was able to private pay for a month of skilled nursing rehab because she did not qualify through insurance, while also paying for her room in AL. Without that money, she would have been discharged with home health care at her AL which would have been very insufficient and risky. She was bed bound for a week and can now transfer to her wheelchair with maximum support. Unless you have money to private pay, all the Medicaid beds are full, and the only options are the 2 and 3 star facilities. My husband and I are trying hard to save for my own retirement to avoid burdening our own kids, but we won’t be in as good as shape as my mom, despite having 2 incomes. And we won’t have the cushion of inheritance that are own parents had - there will be nothing left, and that’s okay, our parents money belongs to them and should fund their care, but it’s still daunting to try to prepare financially for our own healthcare. I’m trying hard to take care of my own health so that I won’t need the same level of care, but we all know not every outcome is under our control.
We see our grocery costs go up quite a bit, imagine what the grocery costs would be for a nursing home/senior facility. Electricity/gas is also more than what we are use to, again imagine the bill for the nursing/senior facility. Landscaping/snow plowing cost are higher due to cost of gasoline.
Now we have "legal" immigrants afraid to come to work, and others resigning from their jobs out of fear. There is now a major work shortage for nursing/senior facilities. Both my parents had wonderful, warm, loving, aides that helped them in their final years, people from around the world. These workers all paid into social security and Medicare but will never be able to use it later in life unless things change where they are allowed back with work visas and eventually become US Citizens (which can take up to 6-10 yrs).
My husband and I saved diligently for our retirement and did not live lavish lifestyles yet we are still worried about having enough to pay for our care, especially is we live as long as our parents (his Mom, 90, my Mom 97 and still living in the house next to mine).
A lot of the cost is driven by the labor shortage which is not going to go away any time soon due to an oversized Boomer demographic and the much smaller consecutive generation populations. Also, the US's replacement birthrate is below 2.1 children which means our younger generations will continue to shrink. We're not as bad as other countries and young people still want to emigrate here and this is a GOOD thing! Our government needs to fix the *legal* immigration backlog so young people can come here, work in jobs that others don't want, and pay taxes while living the American Dream.