My mom, who is covered by medicare in an unassigned program, broke her hip after falling. We had already arranged for the service that allows her to call for assistance, so I received a call at 3:52 am from the company that does it informing me that she was being transported to the hospital. So far so good.
The following weeks convinced me that if you are old and unprotected by the intervention of relatives, good luck to you. Even with extra insurance and medicare it's all yoyo.
I realized what I had just been through after sending this email to my daughter who just started college:
So my my last three weeks have been interesting. After you left, the very day after, the mom's nursing home called to say they were kicking her out on labor day. Yes, on a holiday. So I drove to Cali on Saturday, called care homes and assisted living places on Sunday and visited them. Then on Monday, I took mom home at noon after signing papers and getting more papers necessary for her to move to assisted living. Then called assisted living places again. Guess what? their business offices are closed on the weekend and holidays! How convenient for Kaiser to kick her out on a holiday!
So on Tuesday I managed to get a sympathetic place (which has a user operated espresso machine!) to do a nursing evaluation, do the paperwork, and accept my mom as a resident. Meanwhile, I had a deadline, so I was getting up every day at 4 am to work till noon, taking my mom lunch (cause the food sucks at nursing care) and then working till 6 or so, then going back for a visit until eight, coming home, drinking beer and collapsing. Then I moved her in on the 7th. I finished the day at 8 pm after many back and forth trips for paperwork and clothing and other essentials (including diapers, pads, gloves and wet wipes, just like a baby) and went back to her house, drank three beers, and got ready for my trip to St. Louis the next day on the 8th from Oakland.
Charrette in St. Louis, very interesting city, terrible problem for the site we were working on, solid days of work from 8 am to 8 pm every day, left on the 12th back to Oakland. Back to Walnut Creek on the 12th. On the 13th, took my mom a quart of oj in the morning for her reefer and lunch (a sandwich that we shared) and pizza and salad for dinner and some wine, arranged to have her stay another week in assisted living, went home at eight tired. On the 14th drove back to pdx. No work, just driving. On the 15th, 16th and 17th work on deadlines. Today off thank god. Tomorrow off to ithaca NY, leave at 9:55 am arrive at 10:40 pm. Ack. Sucks being in a small airport market, but whatever. After I get back, I will take a couple of days for myself, and then it's back to Walnut creek to spring my mom and arrange for home care.
In the meantime have arranged for a woman and her landscaping crew to completely clean up my mom's yard which is a monumental disaster, it has thistles and weeds growing everywhere and looks like an abandoned building site in the middle of an orderly neighborhood. I will need to get a crew to clean her house as well. Cobwebs everywhere. The first thing I did when I arrived two weeks ago was mop the floors and clean the kitchen and wash all of the slimy dishes and burnt pots and pans--yes me, Mr. What-Me-Worry slob--because they were disgusting. It is pretty clear that my mom can no longer take care of herself without help.
To explain, I live in Portland and had to drive 10 hours to get to my mom's town--I drove because I thought I would need transportation since there is none there for the kind of trips necessary to move an old person and her belongings from place to place.
My mom is not losing it--she can quiz you on congressional races and who is up in the polls with a day to day intelligence because she reads the NY Times cover to cover. But she is old, 88 years old and frail. So when I received the call saying they were kicking her out of skilled care, I knew they were doing it without any consideration of her ability to take care of herself after surgery. The criterion was that she was able to walk 75 feet with a walker--not whether she was able, as an independent person, to take loads of laundry to her washer, or carry pots and pans for cooking while having to hold on to a walker to stand up. Or to mop and vacuum floors, or any of the other minimal tasks that constitute day-to-day living. The insurance system kicked her out on a holiday, with no support planned and no way to even contact the places where support could be arranged.
I guess my basic question here is this: why do we have a system that is so heartless that it would do this to the elderly? My mom left college to serve in army procurement in World War II in Montana where she met my dad. She was the president of her local League of Women Voters and set up many voter information fairs with participation from legislators for both local and national office. She is not a person who lived an inconsequential life, and yet our health care system, even under medicare, would have abandoned her if she had no relatives to care for her.
Is this the best our country can do? Is it? Are we this bankrupt morally?