As the baby boom generation enters its prime years for long-term care needs, its difficult to come up with a more challenging backdrop than an immigration system about to be cut off at its knees (think: nursing home aides) and states having to fill in funding gaps from Medicaid spending shortfalls.
— John Graves (@johngraves.bsky.social) November 25, 2024 at 2:33 PM
I’m not sure how to get even more bummed this morning then trying to think through this problem.
Chief Oshkosh
Oh, there are plenty of ways to get even more bummed.
However, that won’t help.
I don’t know how to solve this on the macro level. I do know that I have a working vehicle, some extra vacation time, and a lovely spouse coordinating our efforts to deliver meals to folks who can’t get out, maybe some of them among the “dual eligible.” So, that’s what we’re doing tomorrow and for Thanksgiving this year.
lollipopguild
We are going to have a lot of people on the right who spent the last 6 months farking around and are now going to find out.
hrprogressive
The “Fuck You, I Got Mine” generation is about to lose Theirs.
martha
We saw my mom, dad, and FIL through independent living, assisted living, and memory care. And hospice. I cannot see how getting rid of the (mostly) decent women who do this work won’t cause the entire system to collapse. The disgusting irony is that since private equity has bought up so many of these facilities, the financiers might scream and stop the madness. Or not. Don’t get me started about the construction industry.
Barbara
When people look at Medicaid they see a population of relatively healthy young people, mostly women, and, indeed, nearly half of the nation’s births are financed by Medicaid, from a high of like 80% in Louisiana to a low of like 30% in North Dakota. But the relatively much smaller population of elderly “duals” as well as totally disabled of any age (think quadriplegics) account for a disproportionately large share of spending and are dependent on services that they receive every day. So the distribution curve for Medicaid looks very different when you focus on revenue versus demographic characteristics of people being served.
I know we hate mainstream media, but the Washington Post has done really good work reporting on the emerging travails of long term care for baby boomers. People are simply in denial about what’s going to happen when they can’t really live at home any longer, at least not without substantial caregiving support. The gravity of the situation is almost irredeemable in low density states with a lot of elderly people, like Maine.
Sherparick1
I think the Musk-Bessent-Ramasaway solution if for the non-rich people to either get back into the work force or hurry up and die.
Splitting Image
The way it works is that people get what they voted for and they get it good and hard.
As hard as the floor coming up to meet an old person when they fall.
The Other Bob
In the past I always felt that raging against “illegals” was not just a way to win elections, but a way to push undocumented workers into the shadows so they could be further abused by their employers. (Notice how Republican administrations never enforce immigration law on those who hire undocumented workers.)
I suspect Trump will make an example of a significant number of undocumented folks, but not even attempt a mass deportation. Trump won’t really want to shut off the cheap source of workers for his rich supporters.
Sherparick1
@lollipopguild: Sadly, a lot of the people in these facilities, or getting near to using them, don’t vote. I also note that in 2024 the majority of Boomers voted for Harris. It was Generation X that broke hard for Trump, apparently.
Sherparick1
@Chief Oshkosh: Thank you.
Sherparick1
@The Other Bob: I only wish that was the case. But Trump, his sons, Stephen Miller, Tom Homan, & J.D. Vance are all real, real, racialists & fans of Eugenics and want to get as many Black, Brown, and Yellow people out the country that can because of “Purity of Blood.” And they will blame someone else for all the resulting problems & misery.
Barbara
@Sherparick1: Generation X is the generation that resents boomers — and is among the most Republican leaning generations in the last 100 years. I stopped looking at data a while ago, but GWU had collected and made public a repository of data on voting patterns in presidential elections by any number of demographic traits, including generational cohort, and this has been true for a while.
And while it is boomers who are most likely to need services in the next five years, it’s their children who are caught in the crosshairs, the so-called sandwich generation that is burdened with the needs of their elderly parents and their still dependent children.
The Other Bob
@Sherparick1: You may be right. Regardless, it will be painful for far too many.
TBone
Governor Abbott and Tom Homan are going to tour the border at Eagle Pass today.
I’m praying for snakebites and scorpion stings or something.
Or maybe an independent “border militia” member will get gun crazy.
Judy Tenuta voice: it could happen!
Barbara
@Sherparick1: I say this with disgust, but their “solution” to the problem is probably to impoverish so many people who would otherwise give up work entirely when they retire that they remain in the workforce and are willing to take caregiver jobs that are now being done by disproportionately younger and foreign born workers. My sister is actually in this cohort — at 65 she has no plans for retirement because she cannot possibly afford to retire, and she is a caregiver for developmentally disabled adults (and has been for more than a decade). She’s their ideal for the future. I have no idea what will happen when she is too infirm to do this kind of work, because it can be physically taxing.
RevRick
@Barbara:
My wife and I are intimately familiar with the situation of elder care in Maine. My MIL was placed in in-home hospice care in January 2020. She was living with my wife’s sister and brother in law, and we went up in February to see how things were going. We stayed about a week, and as soon as we got back home, we decided we had to go back to share the care with SIL and BIL for as long as mom was alive.
We traveled just as COVID struck and that was an eerie experience.
The hospice nurse came once a day and assisted mom with showers and the like as well as the palliative care. We were only 20 minutes north of Portland, but she had to drive 40 minutes just to get to the in-laws house. And then in mid March she quit from burnout and the new nurse had to drive even further. And she had multiple stops. Not only is Maine an aging state, but it has an aging caregiving workforce.
Mom died in early April. And we were glad we could assist SIL and BIL with the caregiving. How many don’t have such family help?
p.a.
The “pro-family” agenda: you gotta move ma or pa who needs 24/7 care into your home so Elon gets his tax cuts. Oh and homecare services get whacked as well. Just go to youtube to learn basic nursing services.
Have fun conservaturd GenXers
#notallGenX
syphonblue
See the problem is you’re thinking and we don’t like that round here. Thinkin is fer smart people and they always make me feel dum.
bbleh
@The Other Bob: I think this is exactly right. There will be a few TEEVEE SPECTACULAR!! medium-size roundups, complete with ICE guys in full Imperial Storm Trooper gear who are encouraged to bust some heads and interviews with Reichsführer Miller standing next to, I dunno, burning piles of household goods or something, and after that the occasional news piece about ICE Captures Large Numbers Of Illegals In “Sanctuary City,” but overall it will be (1) very few people and (2) mostly in blue states or in other places where it won’t significantly affect Republican businesses.
Of course, there will still be a terrible human cost — a feature, not a bug, for Republicans — and still greater fear among the remaining undocumented immigrants — which will suit Republican business-owners just fine, because that’ll make them even cheaper.
As if his background and his Cabinet nominations haven’t made it clear, this is gonna be “government” for show, and the real work is gonna be done quietly and for the benefit of corporations and the wealthy. Even Mitch McConnell will be happy.
Omnes Omnibus
Generational warfare is such a great way to start the morning.
The Thin Black Duke
@Omnes Omnibus: “Are you not entertained?”
Old Man Shadow
I see a lot of folks playing the “he doesn’t really mean it” game or trying to make sense of it to mute the impending feeling of dread and horror at the scope of human suffering involved.
I hope you’re right.
But I suspect he really does mean it.
AM in NC
@p.a.: Our only saving grace as Gen X/Reagan babies is that we are a small cohort.
Hopefully Milennials and Gen Z will overwhelm us, and all of the reactionary Gen X white doodz driving this garbage will stroke out early from rage/alcohol abuse, or perish in Tesla accidents.
Leaving the decent Gen X white men to work with the rest of us to build a better world.
RevRick
@bbleh:
I don’t think the deportations will stop just because it will hurt business. Trump has whipped MAGA into a raging froth about “illegals” and is appointing zealots to manage the effort.
Private prison business certainly believes it will be a total ethnic cleansing. Trump has sold this to his following. I doubt just kidding will fly.
White & Gold Purgatorian
jD Vance has made several comments that lead me to believe he feels childless Americans are somewhat less than full citizens. That may well be a common position in the incoming government. From there it is an easy step to suppose they feel it is only right and proper for children to provide care for their aging and aged parents, not the government in the form of Medicaid payments to nursing homes.
Childless olds? Well, you should have had kids. And all of you kids with parents or grandparents in nursing homes, start getting the spare room ready.
bbleh
@Barbara: @RevRick: see also WV, where the population is as old as Maine’s and most of the state is similarly thinly populated.
I had occasional help from a sister, but mostly it was me. We were EXTREMELY fortunate (1) to find a few excellent caregivers (whom we took GOOD care of!) to help out for some hours a day and (2) to be able to afford them. The large majority of people are not.
And as to “how does this WORK?” the answer is, it doesn’t, and that’s the plan. Something something tighten your belt something pull yourself up by your own bootstraps something Bad Life Choices. A LOT more people will suffer needlessly and die earlier than they would have, but the wealthy will get their tax cuts. And if anybody grumbles, we’ll just have another round of OOGA BOOGA ILLEGAL TRANSSEXUAL VACCINATION POLICE COMING TO JAB YOU, and they’ll get confused or distracted and not blame the Republicans. (And if and when the Dems fix it, they’ll get no credit because “I EARNED this!”) And sorry to say it, but a lot of well-off Republican voters are such that, if they find themselves having to deal with an elderly relative, they’ll just ship them off to a facility and be done with it (and the kinds of facilities we’re gonna have will be even worse than the ones today, and some of those are pretty awful).
Just call me Mr. Sunshine.
Starfish
@AM in NC: This was phrased perfectly. We are unlikely to have a Generation X president. Straight to Millennials. And we will put up with this avocados on everything nonsense that they have going on.
hells littlest angel
Cruelty being the point, a work requirement for Social Security and Medicare does not seem unlikely. People in nursing homes can be put to work taking care of each other, with one Young Republican overseeing each facility.
bbleh
@RevRick: oh I don’t think it’ll be just kidding. There really will be some BIG, PUBLIC deportations, complete with televised violence. Maybe it’ll even become a regular thing. But they’ll lead the public to believe those things are happening all the time and everywhere — as would be necessary to round up and deport millions and millions of people — when in reality it’ll just be mostly televised spectacle involving … tens of thousands? Maybe even low hundreds? (Not to minimize the suffering involved, of course.)
I’ll wager now that (1) the ACTUAL scale will be FAR less than promised and (2) the public will THINK it’s FAR larger than it actually is.
RaflW
Lemme tell you how it gets worse: The Trumpublicans, in their total mis-read of their “mandate” (and to fulfill their desire since the day Obamacare passed), gut some key provisions from the ACA.
The end of guaranteed issue, whack some subsidies, and a few other choice ‘trimmings’ and the whole insurance and health care system goes incredibly wobbly. A lot of rural (aka ‘red area’) hospitals are under financial strain now (or have already closed). But both rural and city hospitals and health systems will be f’d.
People like me won’t probably be underwriteable (maybe my current non-for-profit co will let me stay on, but I’d imagine even faster premium spikes and deductible increases). I have 6 years till Medicare. Gulp.
Anonymous At Work
For the moment at least, nurses have priority in immigration law, are constantly being advertised (necessity to get H-1Bs), and any advanced certifications also qualify for EB-2s. Only surer method for immigration is becoming an investor/employer (last time I checked, that was around $10 million).
The unskilled positions, the really crappy ones (literally and figuratively), will go unfilled, creating an inflationary wage spiral.
Jeffg166
At age 62 I began paying into an insurance policy that will give me 3 years of home care. At that time I was told it would never go up in price. I would get 24 hour care.
The actuaries guessed wrong about people paying into it for years then dropping it. Things changed.
I was diagnosed with bladder cancer in April. There were two major operation. I had 24 hour home care but I had to pay for someone to be here overnight. The 24 hour care was changed. The price a year also went up. It will go up in the future.
That said it’s still worth the price. Instead of having to lay out 5k a week it was 1k.
I also learned I don’t like people coming in to care for me. I was up and about as soon as I was able.
i was my husband’s care giver for the last five years of his life. He was diagnosed with with progressive supranuclear palsy in 2015. I never fully recovered from doing the care but I didn’t trust anyone else to do it.
A nurse at the hospice he went into at the end told his cousin I probably kept him alive two years longer than if I had put him in a care facility.
Starfish
@RevRick: The private prison business profits from holding people in the US and not actually deleting them.
Ohio Mom
Time for my regularly scheduled reminder that Medicaid (through its Waiver program) is what pays for most of disabled people’s living needs:
Staffing at group homes or other supported living arrangements *
Day programs
Job coaching
Transportation
Social worker case management
Medical coverage (duh, it’s Medicaid)
I might have left something out
* Social Security is used for paying the rent and personal spending (clothes, entertainment, etc.).
Finally, there’s SNAP (food stamps) and of you are very fortunate, a housing voucher (but not if you live in a group home).
I’m about to go in for my doctors appointment so this comment is ending shortly.
What disabled people do without Medicaid, I can not imagine.
Baud
When RFK Jr. implements Healthy Foods, we’re not going to need nursing homes.
Ohio Mom
@Baud: And when he gets rid of vaccinations, no more autism (I don’t know though about people who are already autistic or have other disabilities)
RaflW
@Sherparick1: “they will blame someone else for all the resulting problems & misery”
Of course they will do that. But even with a guy like Trump, the populace tends to track everything that’s going on in the country to the president.
It is highly likely that a lot of things are going to get more expensive, and a bunch of government-run or -assisted things are about to get shittier in ways people didn’t know gov’t was helping.
He can rhetorically seek to shift the blame, but presidents have taken the blame for a long, long time, and I don’t see that magically changing. Dems can help by dusting off some nice “I alone can fix it” clips from his first run and putting those on endless repeat as the facades crumble.
Baud
@Ohio Mom:
Just stop collecting autism stats and you’ve eliminated autism.
Old Man Shadow
@Starfish: That’s the “fun” thing with authoritarian regimes. There’s always an ample supply of dissidents, heretics, and subversives flowing in to replace the dead ones being incinerated.
Ohio Mom
@Barbara: And where does the money to pay your sister come from, Medicaid Waivers.
Kristine
It’s part of Vance & Co.’s overall plan to drive women out of the workforce and back home where they belong, thus loading even more unpaid labor on their backs and overworking them so they’re too exhausted to fight back.
I’m guessing more child labor laws will be repealed/loosened as well.
I’d like to track down the folks who googled “can I change my vote” post-election and shove their heads in recently-used toilets.
mapanghimagsik
@bbleh:
and FTFNYT and FTFWP will be there with beautiful photographs and poignant prose of the suffering, completely ignoring how they helped it along, to show the libs how badly they got owned.
Almost Retired
I help out a handful of board and care type facility clients with employment law issues. They’re well regulated in California, with strictly enforced staff-patient ratios and employee certification requirements, etc. Their staff is mostly documented immigrants.
Their concern is less about performative roundups of the undocumented, but about plunging immigration rates or voluntary repatriation from people at home and abroad who say “fuck this place” about the US. Silicon Valley is also likely to face a high-tech FAFO with imported sofware engineers.
Fun (?) fact: Trump got 6,000,000 votes in California, so they are here among us. They’re calling from within the house!!!!
hells littlest angel
Suitable for the Two Minutes Hate.
Leto
Carl Sagan answered this question back in 1995, and it still holds. Time to get back to homework.
RaflW
@Starfish: I’m one of the oldest Gen Xers, and I think avocados are delish, and are good for way more than guacamole.
TBone
Generational antidote by W.C. Fields. I gotta laugh, there’s no point in crying!
https://youtu.be/4c1MKMGJ75A
If hubby is a very good guy, I will not bake an extra pie for his face!
Old School
How does this work? Simple – we need to funnel money into robotics and AI.
And something something blockchain.
RaflW
@Ohio Mom: I have a friend who was significantly disabled at a young age by a major stroke. He is freaking out really badly. He’s basically saying that Trumpism will kill him.
His parents have helped him a lot, but they’ve gotta be about 80 by now. People like me can help him out some, but like, he can’t live with us, he is quite dependent on a motorized chair and we live in a 3 story townhouse.
different-church-lady
@Sherparick1: I doubt they’ve put even that much thought into it
Old Man Shadow
@Almost Retired: Like everywhere else in America, if you leave the urban areas, it’s deep red all around.
Aziz, light!
@Ohio Mom: New studies conducted by RFK jr show that when autistic people stop getting covid and flu vaccinations, they stop being autistic.
btw my wife is on the spectrum.
Steve LaBonne
If I am still alive and hopefully still able to care for myself in my mid-80s, that’s when my prosthetic aortic valve should be reaching its sell-by date. I have no intention of getting it replaced. That’s my “solution”.
different-church-lady
@White & Gold Purgatorian: As a childless near-old, my plan is to die in my own house crushed to death under a stack of old newspapers.
Starfish
@RaflW: They are everywhere. Do you want an avocado with breakfast? Tough. Here is one anyway. Do you want an avocado with your taco? Here is one just in case.
You know, that sandwich looks like it really needs an avocado.
You are welcome to all these avocados that I did not ask for.
different-church-lady
@hells littlest angel: Pfft, like a young Republican would go anywhere near a nursing home.
Starfish
@different-church-lady: Wait. I thought we cancelled all the newspaper subscriptions.
hells littlest angel
@different-church-lady:
A place where they could get paid to torment people? They’d pay a bribe to get the job.
different-church-lady
@Starfish: Old newspapers.
Omnes Omnibus
@Starfish: I don’t go to all the restaurants, but I am pretty sure that there are lots of things you can order that do not have avocado. Or, and hear me out, you could just ask them to hold the avocado. I find that these work quite well as a ways for me to avoid mayonnaise.
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
@Barbara:
We are also one of the smallest generations. I chunk of Gen Z men also broke GOP. That is a bigger problem.
frosty
@Leto: That was depressing.
Gvg
@Old Man Shadow: oh he means it. But there really are problems that can prevent it. Big unsolvable problems. The problem with those is sometimes they have resulted in big mass killings. I still think he can’t make enough of us go along with that and he is really squeamish himself. Did not order as much direct bloodshed last time as I feared. We need to keep him like that. Remind people of the trials of the Natzi’s that resulted in hangings, and Hitler killed himself.
We could also talk about trials of corrupt judges so he doesn’t count too much on the opinions of this Supreme Court holding up in the future.
I want the economic problems from these policies to be start hitting people before the racists get a chance to herd the soft racists towards genocide. Right now a lot of stupid people still believe in an underpants gnome magic bean theory that expelling the illegal immigrants will somehow make their life perfect in some way. Also trans don’t exist and women are meek or something. I need them to burn their hands before they get escalated to genocide. Trump is racist and stupid, but there are foolish people following him only lightly. Not hardcore, just not attentive. They make me mad, but we have to get them. Also stop the killing.
RileysEnabler
I’m GenX, and getting the sandwich plenty hard. My addled MAGA mother is in Assisted Living, privately insured for now, but we’ve warned her that runs out in 12 or so months, and then it’s going to look very unpleasant. Whoopsie. I have no intention of having her MAGA ravings in my home as I’m still dealing with an at-home child, who’s health insurance may or may not be covered until he is 26….we shall see what they do with the ACA.
It’s already a SUPERFUN situation. Her vote is going to make it even worse, but I’m sure that will be Obama’s fault somehow (she still pins all her ire there). I’m going to let FAFO run its course.
Soprano2
You should read some of the stuff in my FB group for spouses of people with dementia. People who are in poor health themselves taking care of their spouse because they can’t afford help and don’t have family members to help them. Being put on hospice is actually seen as a positive because that means Medicare will pay for some help. I’m fortunate that I can afford to pay for a caregiver, but it’s not cheap.
JML
@Barbara: I do think it’s right that GenX does resent Boomers…and part of it is Boomers have refused to exit the stage politically. (it’s also reflected in corporations, law firms, etc) And now GenX is being passed over for millennials. I kind of understand it.
It’s also the generation that grew up under Reagan and the Republican Revolution of the 80’s, and while for many it sparked a new revival of liberalism…a lot of people fell under the spell of the constant hagiography of Reagan, who was the bestest greatest presidentus ever, according to every Republican for the last 40+ years. (no matter how much lying they needed to do to sell it)
TBone
@TBone: this OK Boomer relies on the classics:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=JhkZMxgPxXU
Horse in the hospital.
JML
@Soprano2: truth. it’s so hard for aging spouses to admit that they can’t keep their spouse with them at home any longer (or admit that maybe they need to no longer be managing a house/yard/etc). My mom’s husband went into memory care when she broke her hip after a fall, and she took him back out after she recovered because she felt too guilty about it. She kept him with her at home for far too long, but no one could tell her anything, and her own health suffered. It took him falling twice outside the home and her realizing she couldn’t get him back up any longer to finally make her realize that things had to change (fortunately no real harm caused by the falls). And when he quickly moved from memory care to hospice at the well-run facility she finally really accepted it.
Dementia is brutal.
zhena gogolia
@Splitting Image: You’ll be old some day. I hope it’s miserable for you.
zhena gogolia
@Omnes Omnibus: This place has gotten unbearable. Yet I keep coming back.
Baud
Everyone over 8 years old sucks donkey balls.
different-church-lady
@zhena gogolia: You can log out any time you like, but you can never leave.
Starfish (she/her)
@Omnes Omnibus: This is exactly what has happened. They have replaced mayonnaise with avocado.
I didn’t really notice this shift until I went to a friend’s college graduation in Minneapolis.
The university catered breakfast had avocado toast. I thought this was funny.
Then the lunch salad place had avocado on just about every salad.
I generally don’t notice it because we are very limited on where we can eat out by my child’s food allergies. (And everyone tells us to feed him avocado because he can’t eat mayonnaise.)
different-church-lady
@Baud: Gonna have a hard time explaining that rotating tag line…
Omnes Omnibus
That’s not at all what I was saying. Jebus.
Starfish (she/her)
@JML: A lot of people started their own companies because they couldn’t find jobs so they are all independent business owners even if their business never did very well and consisted of a lot of petty feuds.
TBone
Headline by Susie Madrak:
cw moss
@Sherparick1: true of the rest you mention, but Trump’s sons have never thought of anything in their lives. They are as stupid as he is, and they learned long ago to make whatever mouth noises will keep daddy’s money flowing to them.
TBone
I saw a story about Elno picking a fight with the U.K. today because they are enemies of Freeze Peach. Details not attended by me, but here’s a song about it
https://youtu.be/nxiYVpd8k4A
Also, Rudy has been given until Dec. 9 to comply. May he Find Out.
Starfish (she/her)
The Immigrant Voter as explained through a YouTube video by The Onion.
Villago Delenda Est
If the issue is funding, the solution is to raise taxes on parasite billionaire assholes like Musk and Bezos and their vile ilk.
Scout211
I guess we are all different so we express our feelings differently. But pre-reacting to the next Trump term when it hasn’t happened yet seems to me to only increase anxiety, helplessness and dread. It plays over and over in the comments here. I’m not sure this is helping anyone. But YMMV.
I probably am in a minority here but I will be waiting to see what actually happens before I start reacting. This election has had me grieving what could have been but I don’t see the value of doom dreading what could happen when it hasn’t happened yet.
I guess I’ll step back again from the comments. The House and Senate Dems, as well as state Dems will need our support in the next two years. That’s my plan for the future. Keep fighting to get more Dems elected.
See ya later, jackals.
brendancalling
That’s what they voted for, and I could not care less (with the exception of the Boomers who voted for Harris).
My now-former weed guy, for example. Boomer, diagnosed with stage 4 prostate cancer, and had to sacrifice his balls to survive. Take LOTS of medications to keep the cancer at bay.
He voted for Trump, and he’s gonna get what he voted for good and hard.
Steve LaBonne
@Scout211: You’re not wrong. It’s just not so easy to do because we’re all aware that there are so many ways in which things could go very badly.
Omnes Omnibus
@Scout211: I am with you.
Barbara
@JML: I also understand the resentment — I am a tail end baby boomer and the next generation had to work out a lot more on their own as they began to experience the impact of all kinds of social and economic changes — yes, divorcing parents, but also disinvestment from education such that they had to pay much more even than their older siblings for the same things. So they are not sympathetic to appeals to making policy for “the good of the community” coming from people who manifestly did not give an FF about the good of the community when it came to the generation after them. I know that doesn’t apply to everyone, but it was enough to affect core social and economic policies for an entire generation. And here we are.
Omnes Omnibus
@Steve LaBonne: But we had the conversation about this yesterday. It all starts with individuals saying no. Resolving to do that helps.
Steve LaBonne
@Omnes Omnibus: https://youtu.be/kGpsXuMvApo?si=4hhntqOzGrmYbh3Q
Barbara
@Scout211: Yes, this is where I am mostly as well but I still think robust conversation is a good idea, so long as it doesn’t sink into doomcasting.
dnfree
It is getting scary out here. I am one of the very oldest baby boomers, so getting close to 80, and my husband is already there. We are still living independently but considering what comes next.
A lot of places with continuous care (like you must go in living independently, and then you’re guaranteed whatever level of care you subsequently need, at an even higher cost) have become unaffordable for most. Facilities near us, in the northwest Chicago suburban area, have buy-in fees of upwards of half a million dollars. That fee is pro-rated over the first four years (you get for instance half the fee back if you leave or die after two years, none back after four years). The monthly fees are getting close to $10,000 a month in independent living for a couple, more in higher levels of care. And suppose one of you can still live independently but the other is in memory care!
On top of that, what if your facility goes bankrupt? That happened to a big facility in Schaumburg called Friendship Village. (Look it up, Dr. Anderson.). Another company bought it out of bankruptcy, but the former residents are scheduled to MAYBE get their money back over a 10-20 year period. Covid did that facility in, what with people not moving in and having to keep people in their rooms and the extra labor costs to take food to their rooms rather than them coming to the dining room.
Jeffg166
@Scout211:
We did have a four year preview when the felon didn’t win the popular vote. Now he thinks he has a mandate. The first four years was chaos and disaster. I expect the coming four years will be more of the same only more intense. I would love to be wrong but my gut says I am not.
Geminid
@TBone: That was a nice Wikipedia article on Iraqi Kurdistan you posted early this morning. It’s a fascinating place, the closest Kurds have come to self rule in this century and maybe any other.
Rudaw English is a good site for current news on Kurdistan. It’s based in Erbil, the capital of the Kurdish Regional Government. Erbil was called Arbela 2500 years ago, back when Alexander the Great fought a big battle not far away.
H.E.Wolf
This is very true, and was a fascinating aspect of transcribing my great-great-grandmother’s diaries.
She was sandwich-generation-ing in 1906!
JWR
@AM in NC:
I recently watched a more than 30 second video clip of Joe Rogan, and every third word was “f*ck” or “f*cker” or f*cking. And then I noticed his overly large muscles. At one point, his face was in profile, and he’s got the weirdest, twisted, slopingest forehead I’ve ever seen, which I’ll bet comes from years of steroid abuse, so maybe that sort of thing will do them in after all.
artem1s
Don’t forget the 75% that vivak wants to cut off Social Security to. What are TCF ‘economic’ voters goind to do when the retirement home kicks Meemaw and Papaw to the curb? That’s the only thing keeping retirees from having to live under a bridge and cooking sparrows and cats and dogs for breakfast every morning. Forget those monthly trips to the casino buffet!
artem1s
@hrprogressive: Raygun babies are just as much the ‘fuckyouIgotmine’ as their parents. Moreso IMO.
p.a.
@artem1s: tRump voter: “shit! Now instead of ma & pa blowing my potential pittance inheritance at the casino, they’re a actually costing me my money here at home.”
JML
@Barbara: i think that’s right. I’m GenX, and we got a lot of the wall street worship, general selfishness shoved right now our throats, all while being the first generation to really have to face things like college debt as a generational issue. I think the housing crisis really slammed a lot of people in GenX as well; our parent’s generation had to deal with mortgages that were 7-10% straight up, but lots of GenX went underwater and lost their house when things imploded. the banks got bailed out but did GenX?
I’m not saying it makes it ok for so many white GenX dudes to have voted for the orange asshole, but it’s a complicated generation of Americans. and I’m not sure too many people have given a fuck.
I mean, I’ve been hearing for 30 years not to take social security or medicare for granted because it’ll be broke long before I get to retire. But I still pay into them every two weeks…
artem1s
for those of you who believe that costs or need for labor or logistics will deter those who want this to happen, you should watch ‘Conspiracy‘. It will show you exactly what the SS and Nazi’s did when those obstacles arose for their plans to ‘evacuate’ all Jews from the Third Reich. ‘Evacuate’ took on a whole different meaning.
The ‘final solution’ was ordered by Hilter. His inner circle conceived it because the courts were interfering with evacuations. And his inner circle executed it. The Wannsee meeting and plan was kept secret from the general public so Hilter and the Reichs Chancellery could claim plausible deniability and go on spreading misinformation about what exactly was happening at Auschwitz and Sobibor and the other camps.
Watch this movie, make your friends and family watch it. Remember Germany was one of the most progressive, educated countries in the world when this all happened. If it helps have them imagine replacing Jew with another minority they might actually care about. Or even ‘my gynecologist’ or ‘my doctor’ if that helps them dig up a shred of empathy.
Soprano2
@JML: I’ve come to see that memory care and nursing homes aren’t necessarily places where we park unwanted people. These are necessary services for when you can’t manage someone at home anymore. In the group we talk about not letting dementia claim two people. There’s so much stigma in our society around putting someone in a nursing home, as if that means you don’t care about them anymore. Oftentimes it’s necessary either for safety (yours and/or theirs) or comfort. We need better nursing homes for people, not a bunch of guilt from society about using one.
Soprano2
@zhena gogolia: Everyone is angry and grieving, that’s a tough situation to be in. We’re also horrified because we know what’s coming, unlike a lot of the people who actually voted for it to happen.
Starfish (she/her)
@Scout211: Lobo just brought this up in the comments of the next post, and I think it is really important.
TBone
@Steve LaBonne: 💜 emojis don’t seem like such a big deal anymore
Soprano2
@Scout211: I’m working on taking this attitude. That’s one reason I quit listening to the NPR news – I don’t need the aggravation or the elevated blood pressure. I think it’s going to be harder for them to do things than they think even if they think they’ve gamed it all out. A plan rarely survives the first encounter with the opposition. OTOH, my attitude toward complaining people who voted for TCFG is going to be something like “Isn’t this what you voted for?” or “I thought TCFG was going to fix everything”.
Omnes Omnibus
@TBone: Redacted.
TBone
@Geminid: thank you for the pointer(s), I always love history and wish I could simply remember more of it by rote.
My new priest puts a little history lesson in every sermon, and he manages to pack a lot of information and guidance into each sermon that way. My new church is called St. Andrews and I just found out that his saint’s day is on my birthday. Although I learned the Bible from a Jewish professor at a Jesuit women’s college, I have not much knowledge of all things Catholic so am delving a bit more than usual.
Our times are not uniquely bad times.
TBone
@dnfree: hugs to you both
cw moss
@RaflW: hola, comrade Ralf. First wave Gen-X too. About almost being a baby boomer: Missed it by *that* much!
JML
@Soprano2: That’s absolutely the right way to think about it, IMHO. Dementia, Alzheimers, and related/similar diseases are so cruel and so painful. And they frequently do “take down two”, which is not the way it should be. I think any family that’s been through it with memory care has infinite sympathy for anyone facing those painful choices, so hopefully that reduces the stigmas and resistance to making better choices for our loved ones who need more and trained care. better nursing homes and complexes that have good continuity of care are the solution, and finding ways to make it financially viable for people needs to be a priority.
My mom had just made the decision to move out of the house, and we had moved her into a complex where she could see her husband in hospice without every having to go outside. It was independent living, which she could still do but had the option for moving to assisted living if/when she started to need more help. My sister and I were frankly excited that she would be able to have more of a life again…and she stroked out after being there barely a week. sigh.
White & Gold Purgatorian
@different-church-lady: Ha! Not as funny to me as it would have been a couple weeks ago. Last week my mid-nineties Mom, who lives alone in her own home, was knocked down when a stack of Rubbermaid storage boxes fell over. Basically ok, but needed many stitches. Rubbermaid containers have since been replaced by a big dresser with drawers to hold all her pillows and craft stuff.
TBone
@TBone: new church is Episcopalian
Omnes Omnibus
@TBone: If I wanted to know what some priest said every Sunday, I would go to church.
zhena gogolia
@Omnes Omnibus: I’m noticing a big uptick in church attendance among jackals since the election.
Omnes Omnibus
@zhena gogolia: I am fine with that. I just don’t need to have someone else’s priest’s sermon summarized here every week.
jowriter
@Scout211: I think you’ve got a good idea. I am tired of the gloom and doom quotient of many posts here. I’ll always have a look, but I need to put my energy elsewhere. We’ve got a lot of days and months to get through on the power of our own determination not to give up.
Kathleen
@hells littlest angel: Or get drugs.
TBone
@Omnes Omnibus: 😆
Kayla Rudbek
@Omnes Omnibus: however, it is useful and heartening to know that not all the Christian priests are cooperating with fascism (although my problem with the Christian Bible is that you can get any answer you want to out of the exact same text, and in my arrogant opinion a holy book should have a clear, accurate, and consistent message with provable results from following the instructions)..
Martin
@Barbara: I think this is correct. We’re older Gen X and right now we’re dealing with a landscape of boomer relatives that we are expected to care for to some degree. Financially most of them are in good shape, but being an only child of divorced parents means I’m juggling a LOT of people – which is a qualitative difference from older generations that had more siblings and fewer divorces – and for me the financial side of things aren’t a problem but the legal side is. People struggling with dementia, Alzheimers, etc. which is increasingly the problem since we’ve gotten really good at keep people’s hearts from exploding and whatnot, means that handing legal access to savings so that I can pay for care is really hard. In part because people who can’t remember they are sick tend to be really resistant to handing over the controls. So I have to rely on doctors and whatnot to sign off on statements of incapacity, which they are disinclined to write due to their own legal exposure.
And we’re no longer in an era of just needing to get a few account numbers and a signature cards – there’s hundreds of logins and passwords, money spread across 20 different retirement instruments because Congress keeps fucking making new ones, all the way down to really basic problems like your app will only respect one account, but I need to manage mine and my parents, and you’ve fired all the customer service people that aren’t on the back-end of the app, so there’s nobody for me to call to do stuff. That leads me to have to either stake out completely different services from mine just to work around these problems, or have a separate cell phone that I hang all of my mom’s accounts off of with it’s own phone number, etc.
There’s a massive amount of complexity created for the sake of simply not wanting to pay your customer service reps. Everyone was encouraged to put shit into trusts, but nobody knows how to attach the trust to some of these services. The rules for doing things in my mom’s name and in my mom’s trust don’t match. Parents across different states means everyone has different rules for a bunch of things.
And a lot of government services just fucking refuse to do the thing you would think makes sense. My wife agreed to help a friend of hers with Alzheimers who has no family, but my wife doesn’t yet have the authority to sell her car. They’ve revoked her license but she refuses to stop driving. We’re afraid she’s going to kill someone. We’ve called the local PD ‘just boot the car’ and they won’t do anything. We’ve called her insurance company, they won’t do anything. We’ve asked the social worker – they can’t do anything. Do I really have to go and pull her spark plugs to resolve this? All of these actors should have a vested interest in fixing this problem and nobody will do shit.
I’m smart enough to know that most of this complexity came either from republicans to help people dodge taxes or to make government harder to work with or to funnel some cut to their buddies, but a lot of voters just see ‘government doesn’t work’ and vote Republican or maybe libertarian. But I suspect it also suppresses Democratic vigor because it’s not like they’re proposing solving this stuff. I certainly have days where my brain is screaming ‘I will vote for whoever will fix this nightmare’.
Martin
@Omnes Omnibus: If you want the history lesson but not the god stuff, your local UU church usually has that space pretty well covered.
Ruckus
@Barbara:
As someone on the older side of commenters (I’m in the 4th quarter of living…) and I have the VA for healthcare. A lot of people don’t have anything other than Medicare. And while it is far better than nothing, if shitforbrains has his way even that may go away, leaving a lot of seniors with zip, nada, nothing. Now of course some will think that’s a good thing as they do not want to pay a dime more for anything than they have to. Problem they don’t see is that as humans get old, they need more healthcare than most do at a younger age. Not necessarily big stuff but often more care and at some point that may get close to or become, day to day care. Healthcare in my lifetime has gone from one vaccine, a stethoscope and maybe a blood pressure cuff to dramatically more. And we all know that regular stuff (food, clothing, housing) costs more than it did not long ago, and far more than it did decades ago when us geezers were born. It is the nature of things and having to provide them for far more people.
SomeRandomGuy
Brief pop-in: when you don’t now how a massive problem-to-be can possibly be handled for fixed, STOP WORRYING. You won’t have any ideas until the fecal matter impacts the atmospheric energy generator. (When the uh, stuff… yeah, stuff, hits the fan.) I know, I said “stop worrying” when that’s nearly impossible – but, if you *can*, it’s good. If you put up christmas decorations, and realize you haven’t thought of future problems at all, *good*. And now I will once again fellate this portable popsicle purveyance. Um – blow this popsicle stand.)
opiejeanne
@Sherparick1: I have a friend in my quilting group who is Asian mixed with other things (Thai? Maori? maybe European?). She is selling everything she can’t take in a suitcase because even though she’s naturaized, her parents are not. I think she has a German passport and optional German citizenship because she was born there. She’s unsure where she’s going as of the last time I talked to her, maybe Spain. The group is absolutely sick about it.
opiejeanne
@hrprogressive: That was the Silent Generation and a lot of the Greatest Generation.
Ruckus
As an retired old fart (retired at 72, so that’s 60 yrs of working) who was the youngest of my family and am now the oldest in the extended family of cousins, some of whom have passed, with all aunts/uncles gone as well, my, as of now +3/4 of a century has been rather interesting in many ways. The first car I rode in was a 1947 Packard ex army staff car, which I believe was never actually used by the army, but sold to highest bidder for likely pennies on the dollar after WWII, born and raised in SoCal, a USN veteran of the Vietnam war era, and seeing the asshole conservatives coming back in power, especially asshole #1, really doesn’t inspire confidence in many of the citizens of the US to be actual citizens and not at least attempt to not burn the whole thing down. But then many of them do not seem to be the types that think it takes all kinds. They seem to think that they are the superior/best of the lot. But if they are it’s a pretty shitty lot. I see conservatives have been losing ground for most of my lifetime, primarily in that they often have really shitty concepts of being part of a positive country and moving ahead and instead seem to think that burying their heads up their exit port is the way to go.
Chris T.
@JWR:
It’s from hGH (human Growth Hormone) abuse. Causes forehead, jaw, hand, and other bone growth. Roger Stone is another hGH abuser.
Rogan was in MMA (Mixed Martial Arts) and no doubt used steroids as well, but those don’t distort your head so much. On the other hand some AAS (Androgenic Anabolic Steroids), particularly trenbolone, seem to cause brain shrinkage.
CODave
@Splitting Image:
That’s from an H.L. Mencken quote that I’ve been using quite a bit lately:
“Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.”