Long Term Care Crisis

June 10, 2009
Interview with Howard Gleckman, author of Caring for Our Parents

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Mike Carruthers:
As we live longer and longer some of us will become frail and unable to care for ourselves.

Howard Gleckman:
75% of people who are 65 or older will need long-term care sometime in their lives.

Howard Gleckman, author of the book Caring for Our Parents, says the need for long-term care is a real crisis for many families.

One of the mistakes that people make in fact is that they think Medicare will pay for their long-term care and it won't. Only Medicaid will pay and to be eligible for that you have to be very, very sick and you have to be impoverished. To qualify for Medicaid in most states you cannot have more than about $2000 in financial assets.

And it's not just the financial toll  that long-term care takes on a family, it's also the time, energy and sacrifice.

I remember talking to a family up in Vermont whose son was a contractor and he told me that he probably gave up $50,000 worth of work just to help care for his mother.

No one likes talking about this but it's something that is likely to affect all of us in some way at some point. There is of course long-term care insurance but that can get very expensive and doesn't always kick in when you'd like it to.

You have to be quite ill; you have to prove that you cannot perform what they call activities of daily living, which are things like feeding yourself. You probably have to be either in a nursing home or at home - very rarely will long-term care insurance policies pay for assisted living for example.

To hear the complete unedited interview, click here.