This I strongly believe and it is one of the reasons that I am hosting the show, “Divergence in Healthcare”. In this week’s show, I will try to explore the future of long term health care and the future of nursing homes. According to various estimates, the cost of nursing home care ranges from the AARP’s estimate of $50,000 per year to the estimate made by Dr. Judy Feder (Georgetown University policy professor and long term care expert) of about $80,000 per year. This, along with the current unemployment rate of about 9%, with a national poverty rate of 15%, the lack of savings by many people as well as the start of the 75M baby boomer’s retirement, paints a very grim picture for our aging population. The baby boomer population constitutes 25% of the U.S. population and they are all retiring between the years of 2011 and 2029, when the economy is in a downturn and the federal deficit is more than $14T and growing at a rate of approximately $1T per year. This is worsened by the exportation of jobs and companies overseas. Poor health and habits of the population, high rate of substance abuse, increasing dependency on government help has made things worse. The worldwide economic problems especially with the impending bankruptcy facing the nations of Greece, Spain and Italy, the war on terror, turmoil in the Arab world, financial troubles facing many states in the U.S., especially, California, Illinois and New Jersey have not helped our situation. The threat of earthquakes in California, and the East Coast (especially with the drilling of the Marcellus shale), tornadoes, hurricanes and storms and other calamities due to climate changes brought about by our continued use of oil, gas and coal for fuel has the predictions of gloom and doom ever a reality. All these happenings point to nothing but the threat of the end of the United States as we know of, or the entire world.
We owe it to our children to fix our country or possibly the entire world. But we cannot do that without starting from the young up to the middle aged people. We have to start curtailing personal freedom when it is a threat to our civilization and institute more personal and social responsibility among the population. We cannot allow anybody to destroy our world or our civilization. But this dialogue also involves securing the future of our elderly population who has done so much for our country.
If you want to know more of what you can do to help yourself and our country, please read my book, “The Body’s Acupuncture Energetics”. The book will teach you about your body, the different things that break it down and also teaches you the different ways that you can take care of your body, both in acute trauma as well as in chronic illnesses. The book is published by Xlibris and can be accessed through www.xlibris.com or at www.bodysacuenergetics.com.
In today’s show I discussed the situation of our long term healthcare situation with Rita Maher, a nurse of 33 years’ experience and the current Eastern Regional Director of Extendicare Health Services. She manages six nursing homes with about 1,000 nursing home residents.