Good morning,

Mea culpa for not posting yesterday. I was without help and Mom wasn't doing well. Things resolved last night and this morning, she's doing much better. As a full-time caregiver, my life revolves around hers and when she's ill, my world stops.

Mom doesn't have an illness. I had a caregiver who told me she had allergies when, in reality, she had a sore throat. For Mom and other aging people who are not as robust as we are, this can be a disaster. I reacted quickly to keep her out of the hospital.

I know I made a strong statement about the nursing home in the book and I stand by it. When I wrote the book, it was based on my experiences.

Since writing the book, I have heard horror stories from others that would make your hair stand on end, so I now take the liberty of adding to my prior statement: I think all nursing homes should be closed! There is no purpose for them.

Terminally ill people can get hospice services which I understand is excellent. People like my mother should be able to stay in their own homes or live with their families. One of the main roadblocks for that is Medicare. It's time to revise the progam so we can take care of our parents.

Briefly, Medicare was established in 1965 to pay for catastrophic illness. (You could still go to a doctor for $20 in those days!)

Medicine has changed. It's more preventative now, yet Medicare has not changed with the times. One of the issues is home care.

I pay for my caregiver out of pocket. Medicare should help pay for home care because it's more cost-effective for me to take care of my mother at home than if she was in a nursing home.

I'm very fortunate. I can work at home. If I had to work in an office, I don't know what I'd do because I can't afford full-time care for her. (My mother is not ambulatory and I can't leave her alone.) If Medicare helped pay for caregiver costs, I think more people would take in their family members.

[ January 05, 2006, 12:39 PM: Message edited by: F N Rosenstock ]