Trickle down economics, up close and personal

How do you want your parents or grandparents spend the last part of their lives?

How do you want to spend your last years of life?

We all know the horror stories about nursing homes. They’re understaffed and underpaid. Now because of recent state and federal budget cuts, they are expected to further reduce their operating budgets, at least those receiving money from Medicare/Medicaid.

Many nursing homes are privately held, for-profit facilities. Their administrators most likely will still be expected to show the same profit margin as before the cuts. Shareholders don’t like it when you reduce their returns, regardless of the reason.

So where will that money come from?

Reductions in supplies, skilled and unskilled workers, food, medical care?

Attention and care will be reduced to a “good enough” level rather than the compassionate care we all want and still envision.

Because of technological advances and the availability to more and better healthcare, more people are living longer.

Experts predict that by 2011, half of all U.S. workers will be over the age of 45 and more than 77 million people will be aged 50 or older.

With this increase in our aging population, comes a niche market for investors, entrepreneurs and inventors.

In a July 22, 2005 article in the Charlotte Business Journal, Todd Wiebusch, president and chief executive of CHMG, a healthcare investment company, said, “Home health care is growing 7 percent to 9 percent a year organically. That's a pretty attractive market to just hang your shingle out and grow that much. Home health also has a stable reimbursement environment.”

“Clever people are building entire careers out of creating need and demand in a growing market with money: those of us over 50,” observed George H. Schofield in his new book, “After 50 It’s Up to Us,”

Is eldercare really a place where we want to see investment growth or inflation-proof investment opportunities?

Is a 7 or 9 percent return an unrealistic expectation simply because it is a business that essential care, or just a matter of good business?

While many elders will remain healthy and active until they die, many others will not. And most of those who don’t will enter their latter years unprepared to provide the kind of care they will need to remain happy and healthy.

What will become of all these old people who are no longer able to care for themselves but have no money to pay for advanced care?

Do we shrug our shoulders and say, “You should have planned better,” and continue to reduce government spending on their behalf?

Or do we provide care that is “just good enough” to carry our country’s elderly from their own care into death, instead of the compassionate attention we all desire and envision?

We have tinkered with one end of the equation of living longer, but we have not even begun to approach its corollary.