Okeefenokee wrote:MilSpecs wrote:
Nursing home = a medical facility. You'd better make sure your incapacitated parent gets into one or you'll deserve your eventual arrest for elder abuse when your bedsore-riden elder dies of infection or aspirates food or otherwise is harmed by being deprived of medical care as happens when people mistake themselves for doctors and nurses.
Assisted living is what you're railing about. And apparently the fact that we don't presently live in a third world country. They're available if you don't like the US. Don't let the door hit you.
They are colloquially the same thing, used interchangeably by everyone.
It is telling that you are trying to paint the warehousing of elders as the moral route.
They're not the same thing and everyone doesn't use them interchangeably.
I get you're angry about a lousy situation. Everyone's angry about it. It's always been a lousy situation. I remember visiting my great-great-grandfather in a nursing home, because he was incapacitated in his 90s and his daughter was in her 70s and herself incapacitated. The difference back then was that the nursing home was local, local people staffed it, and people could visit their loved ones often and keep an eye on their care. Warehousing people in their own homes is as bad as warehousing them in a nursing home. Worse - few older people can adequately care for an immobile adult. And yet nursing homes will continue to be the inevitable end for the vast majority of the infirm elderly. Assisted living is different - it can successfully be done at home
with the resources to do so.
To claim people are deliberately tossing their elderly parents into substandard care is a childish way of dealing with anger at the situation. Instead of casting aspersions on older people who are themselves trying to care for the elderly, come up with a good, realistic idea. People ARE living much longer than they used, on the whole. The waiting list for places and care is forever. Most people can't afford the facilities - again, minimum $50,000 for a poor quality one. Who is pocketing all that money and hiring the cheapest possible people? Legislation requiring that a percentage of the take be spent on the clients isn't costly and is clearly moral. Assisted living is in even more demand than nursing homes, because simple, affordable care that would allow people to remain in their homes (and their childrens' homes) is not available. These are solvable problems but they're getting much worse.
