Failing to plan for nursing home care is as natural as eating too much of the wrong foods. People just don’t want to believe that a horrific end result will really occur to them. For most people who are an appropriate age to plan ahead, nursing home confinement is just that, a horrific, and completely fictional, possible outcome. In reality, if you are in your 60s today, absent being lucky enough to be hit by a bus, or have a heart attached several miles away from a competent ER, you are almost certainly going to spend you last years, months, weeks or days in a Nursing Home. It is the natural result of people living long enough that they outlast their body’s ability to service its own needs.
Some people will read this small post and it will prompt a thought process. Hopefully, they will go obtain quotes for long term care insurance and put a policy that provides 100% of the cost of care, over a five year period, with a cost of living rider, into force. Their spouses and children will thank them for it.
Other people will read this and decide it is time to have that conversation, maybe again, where they tell their sons or daughters that if the horror of nursing home care ever dawns in their door, they should do the right thing and take the old man out behind the garage and solve the problem once and for all. ANYTHING but a Nursing Home.
A select few will simply resolve that they will never go into a nursing home, No sir, Not me.
Only one of these groups of people is following a logical, caring course of action. Only one is showing that their brains are bigger than their egos or their fear. The rest are future clients of a fully qualified elder law attorney.