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Nursing homes are in aggregate a symptom of a social disease- end of life care for the elderly and the infirm is atrocious.
Society has kicked families out of their homes, and left the elderly out to dry, while simultaneously sucking up adult children's time that would be spent caring for the elderly in their last years.
The problem is that historically, we simply didn't have the technology to keep them all alive, usually, when elderly would spiral, they would spiral relatively fast- infection, diabetes, cancers, all things that had no cure in the ancestral home. In the current era, we just wait for them to decline, and while we have cures for the most major diseases, we have nothing to help the elderly live more fulfilling and yes, even economically-productive lives. They are shoved into a heartless building where they play bingo on Tuesday at nine am and wait for god to come knocking, with the very occasional visit from what remains of the local evangelical churches activities.
Yes, there are problems in nursing homes, but no, there's no incentive to solve it, one way or the other. The country seems locked in indecision on this particular issue. The AARP is the largest focus group in the US, and as a bloc, holds a stranglehold on the younger generation's ability to help them solve their problems. Young and middle-aged voters are similarly out-of-sighting and out-of-minding the entire problem- shove the elderly into a nursing home and visit once a month until they die-if you're nearby. Maybe do a task that the nurses haven't gotten to. Then move away when offered a raise or a new job in a new state.
Ol' granny's got 5 years still left in her, nevermind that she can't make her way to the toilet any more, but her son Kyle is 50 years old and still in his career and living in tennessee, five hundred miles away.
Phrasing it that way is a tad too extreme and simplistic, I'd say.
Anyway, one reason I find this news a bit strange is due to one argument I've heard from normies about this, namely that so many elderly have supposedly died from COVID in nursing homes that those've become less crowded than before. To be fair, it does sound like BS.
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I know there's no great solution to this problem in general, and no one in my family has lived long enough for it to be an issue, but the idea of putting my mother in a nursing home fills me with a cold dread.
What about the idea of changing her diaper, washing her entire body, carrying her around the house, feeding her, changing dressings, etc...
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That's understandable, but whatever alternative will be available to you, or to most people in that situation, at that point will probably be even worse anyway.
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The most coherent decision to alleviate this would be more along the lines of 'maybe 95% of lifetime health expenditure shouldn't be poured into the last 3-4 years of low QALY living' as opposed to reworking the healthcare system. It's simply unsustainable to have the majority of people make it to their 80's after a long life of likely not even being an especially net contributor to the public purse.
That isn't a decision, it's a statement of the problem. What would you decide to do to alleviate this?
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