If you are feeling like Chicken Little, you have every right to feel this way. With seniors seeing all of their hard earned nest egg disappearing they are in a crisis and they are feel the pain? This article was taken from a noted person who deals with the senior's health issues on a Daily basis.
I want to thank them for bring this issue out so many can get the help they need. If and when you are felling like you have no options think about this. You work you entire life to pay for your home, let it pay you now and not worry about what you are going to leave your family. Think about how they will feel if you are financially doing well, and can afford to live without being a burden on them.
You can accomplish this by receiving a Reverse Mortgage. It often is at the moment when an elderly patient is about to be discharged from the hospital that he or she first faces the prospect of having to pay the total long-term expenses of either nursing-home or home care services.
This easily can come to $50,000 or more a year -- at a time when the primary objective for any patient and family should be excellent care and emotional support, not a desperate fight to preserve one's income and savings. It widely is known among older Americans, their families and their friends that a long-term illness could wipe out a patient's savings. Long-term care includes many different support services aimed at helping chronically ill patients either in their homes or in a nursing home.
Medicare does not pay for long-term care. The only government assistance for the expense of long-term care is the health insurance for the poor, Medicaid. Tragically, some families would rather risk substandard facilities for their loved ones rather than choose the Medicaid option. As a former investigator for the New York State Attorney General's Medicaid Fraud Control Unit, I have seen firsthand many victims of the system.
One elderly woman, who was not poor enough to qualify for Medicaid, was exhumed from her final resting place to determine whether she had been starved to death by the operator of an illegal nursing home whose monthly fees were less than half of its licensed competitors. Unfortunately, this case is not an isolated example of a family under duress resorting to underground providers of care to shield a loved one's assets. Long-term care, whether at home or in a nursing home, often can wipe out the life savings of a chronically ill patient in one year or less.
Under current eligibility rules for Medicaid coverage of long-term nursing care, a recipient usually may not have assets in excess of $2,000. This has led many Americans to manipulate the Medicaid system by transferring assets to heirs and beneficiaries in an effort to avoid spending their life savings on nursing-home care. Some Americans, desperate to preserve an estate, have taken extreme measures such as divorce or spousal refusal, whereby one spouse refuses to pay for the long-term care needs of the other.
Some have been able to use loopholes in the Medicaid system to transfer part of their life savings before they apply for Medicaid. Others have stopped saving and simply spend all of their income without regard for the future. In effect, some people are using Medicaid as their long-term care insurer, while others who do not game the system are systematically impoverished as they pay privately for their own care.
Then, having finally qualified, these people are reduced to a state of humiliating poverty and dependence on government support. Many cannot afford to pay the transportation costs of visits from their relatives or to upgrade their living quarters. This perverse system rewards deception and punishes law-abiding citizens. Financing long-term care is supposed to be the responsibility of the patient.
In reality, the burden falls on the taxpayer, because the payments for almost 70 percent of the long-term care needs of older patients are paid for by Medicare and Medicaid. Many hardworking and independent older Americans in need of long-term care have contributed a lifetime of energy and dedication to their communities and the country. These people and their families do not want to be on medical welfare. The optimal solution for improving long-term care is a dramatic increase in the number of private payers.
The Institute for Social Economic Studies has developed a proposal to solve this problem. Under the institute's plan, every dollar paid out by the patient would protect a dollar's worth of assets from the draconian requirements of Medicaid eligibility. For example, if a patient with life savings and property totaling $100,000 spent $50,000 for long-term care, the remaining $50,000 of assets would be protected from eligibility rules, providing the patient would otherwise qualify for Medicaid. Although some of a patient's assets would be protected, all of a patient's income would be used to pay for long-term care under this plan.
In addition, to further promote private funding, this plan would protect all of a patient's remaining assets (not income) after he or she pays for three years of nursing-home care or six years of full-time home care. Under this arrangement; elderly patient not their relatives would have control over their hard earned savings and could use them to purchase personal items and luxuries currently out of reach to many. The numbers of older Americans will more than double in the next 32 years. By year 2030, the elderly will account for 20 percent of the population and number more than 80 million. It is urgent that we develop a solution for long-term care now.
If we don't act, everyone -- workers, our children, our parents and our grandparents could pay a severe price. Let's avoid this tragedy while time is still on our side by older seniors who own homes receiving proceed from a Reverse Mortgage they can shield themselves from financial disaster.
Some are having trouble sleeping, she says, others are not eating well, and a few have taken up smoking again. But most say they no longer feel in control of their financial future and well-being after the wild market swings of the past few weeks. Constant news reports on home foreclosures, bank failures, the credit crunch, a $700 billion bailout for the financial industry and the steady erosion of retirement savings have jolted anxious and easygoing types alike. But for those nearer to retirement, or living on fixed incomes, the stakes are higher-and so are stress levels. According to an American Psychological Association (APA) poll released in October, the miserable economy "significantly stressed" a whopping 80 percent of Americans in September, up from 66 percent in April. The survey compared the stress levels of more than 2,500 adults nationwide.
Among the respondents, women reportedly felt more anguish about declining economic conditions than men did-84 percent compared with 75 percent. And those over age 63 reported more stress (86 percent) than boomers ages 44 to 62 (83 percent) and those ages 18 to 29 (71 percent). However, when it came to day-to-day pocketbook issues, the youngest age group (83 percent) reported being more worried than boomers (79 percent) and those 63-plus (73 percent). A separate survey of working adults, released Oct. 27, found that 92 percent said financial worries were keeping them up at night.
The poll of 1,137 people, conducted by Com Psych, a provider of employee assistance programs, said the biggest concern for respondents was the high cost of living (30 percent),credit card debt (29 percent), mortgage payments (14 percent) and declining retirement accounts (13 percent). Alan Keck, a psychologist in Altamonte Springs, Fla., says the mounting stress his clients are carrying has "complicated their treatment." He hears growing complaints about sleep disturbances, unintended weight loss, depressed mood and obsessive thoughts. "I can tell you that the economy has played havoc with the plans of a few of my clients-everything from delaying the completion of the divorce process because of inability to sell a jointly owned house, to full-blown anxiety and depression syndromes over threatened loss of retirement savings," he says.
For older workers, a declining portfolio can be enough to provoke fear and panic. One woman in her 60s, who is planning to retire in two years, says she gave in to that fear two weeks ago when she bailed out of the stock market and opted for safer investments in money market funds and CDs. "I was constantly worried that I might lose what I've built up," says the woman, a publishing industry professional who asked to remain anonymous. "I don't know if I did the right thing by pulling out of the market; we'll see how things shake out.
I just wanted to preserve what I had. Uncertainty when you're nearing retirement is very stressful." So in closing I want to again thank them for posting this article to help seniors around the world know that they are not alone. To find out how you can increase the money you need for retirement and how a Reverse Mortgage can help stabilize your future see the facts.
