Great article in USA Today
USA Today newspapaers are running a special article about elderly care.
The articles are especially interesting because they could help give us some insight into the situations that families must deal with on a daily basis. These articles say that right now 48% of baby boomers are providing some care for their aging parents, and 8% have parents who have moved in with them, and this trend is growing.
If you click on the various links in the articles, they will take you to more articles which contain many interesting statistics. The comments made by readers at the bottom of the articles are also interesting.
The percentage of people over 75 in nursing homes fell from 9.6% in 1985 to 6.4% in 2004, according to the AARP Public Policy Institute.
The average annual cost for a semiprivate room in a nursing home is nearly $67,000, reports the MetLife Mature Market Institute reports. In parts of the country, it's much higher. Still, if a senior citizen exhausts all her assets, Medicaid will cover her nursing-home care.
Not so with other types of long-term care. Except in isolated instances, Medicaid doesn't cover assisted living or home-based health care. That means families often have to pay those costs. The average cost for an assisted-living facility was $35,616 a year in 2006, according to the MetLife Mature Market Institute. The average cost for a home health aide is $19 an hour.
