-Isms

For more than a year, I’ve been navigating the health care system for Dad. It’s been an eye-opening experience.

I’m not sure you’re ever prepared to take over your parents’ finances and deal with insurance, Medicare and hospice requirements. I know I wasn’t.

My saving grace: a family of medical professionals who are willing to help me understand the system and endless forms I’m filing.

Our family agrees he receives excellent care at the facility in Battle Creek. We’re encouraged by his willingness to join in activities and visit with family and new friends.

Not everyone is so lucky.

I was reminded of that while reading a Washington Post article, written by Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Eli Saslow. He tells the story of the Marlene and Earl Kennedy family from Broken Bow.

Parkinson’s disease has ravaged Earl, 88. He no longer walks and cannot eat solid foods.

After a fall, Earl entered a nursing home located three minutes from home. In May, the facility’s owners filed for bankruptcy, leaving families scrambling to find new placements for loved ones.

Marlene attempted to move Earl into another nursing facility in Broken Bow, but discovered they limit the number of residents on Medicaid, because reimbursement costs paid are at least 40 dollars per day less than the actual cost of offering care, which hovers around $200.

Now, Marlene, 84, makes the 100-mile round trip to Cozad to visit Earl as often as possible.

According to Saslow, more than 260 rural nursing facilities across the country have shut down for financial reasons in the past three years. “In the past decade, rural American has lost at least 250 maternity wards, 115 hospitals, 3,500 primary care doctors, 2,000 medical specialists and hundreds of nursing homes.

He continues, “...In rural Nebraska, only 35% of nursing home residents had money to pay for their own care...”

We’re lucky our parents had planned for their futures, but they, too, faced bumps along the way. They didn’t plan on Mom’s cancer diagnosis and seven-year battle that ended in 2015. I’m certain they didn’t plan on Dad’s near brushes with death during the past 18 months and a move into a care center.

No matter how much budgeting and planning I’ve done, cost-cutting steps I’ve implemented, one day the money will run out.

The Kennedys story hits too close to home. It’s a tale twisted together with skyrocketing medical costs and loss of quality medical care.

I’ve read and reread the article and so many thoughts come to mind, similar parallels between the story of every man in rural America and every family trying to maintain a loved one’s quality of life.

We need affordable, quality health care in our communities. We need to be better prepared to care for older family members. We need to offer incentives to attract top-notch professionals.

Most of all, we need to be better prepared for our own futures.

After reading the article, a friend wrote me, “I think that many young people don’t have any concept of what it means to be old. I know we didn’t.”

I believe many of us fall in that category.