Who's Your Daddy?

Earlier this week, I met with employees from two of Ecumen’s senior housing locales, Centennial House in Apple Valley and Lakeview Commons in Maplewood. We were talking about the challenges of paying for long-term care when we age. A casual comment at Centennial House turned into a really important learning moment for all of us.

Linda, Barb, Peggy, Peggy, Mary, Lisa at Centennial House

Jessica, Audrey, Mary, Glenn and Joyce at Lakeview Commons

Nursing home care is expensive—as much as $80,000 a year, so it’s not surprising that people might need public assistance to pay for this care, which is uninsured. Most of the women (the group was all women) at Centennial House knew of someone who had turned to public assistance to pay for their care. I asked them—“How does this make you feel? Happy that your friends are cared for? Resentful? After all, public assistance is your money. It has to come from somewhere, and it comes from our taxes.”

You could feel the energy in the room shift as the women took this in. I heard comments like “Wow, I never thought about it this way,” “Hmm…I’ll have to think about that,” and “I always looked at it as beating the system, not as my money.” I asked them if they thought it was important for everybody to understand that the “system” is nothing more than our money. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.

And so they helped me realize how disconnected we have become from understanding our collective responsibility to one another, even though the evidence is all around us. It’s easy to point fingers at the family who turns to Medicaid for their long-term care or the family who runs up credit card bills, but this starts at the tippy-top, with dear old Uncle Sam.

The national debt now stands at $12.6 trillion and ticking (see the debt clock I've added on the side bar). That’s equal to $40,700 for every man women and child in the U.S. Do you have an extra $41,000 laying around for our dotty relative? Just where do we imagine repayment will come from? Baby boomers are about to retire, and for the most part haven’t even saved enough for themselves. If the demographics weren’t about to go upside down for the first time in the history of mankind (i.e., more elderly than children-- in 1950 there were six social security beneficiaries for every worker; it 2030, there will be 46) we could cross our fingers and hope our kids will pay for our excesses. Maybe the Chinese will take pity on us. Or maybe we can keep printing money and the Fed can experiment with negative interest rates. That would create a painless way of erasing our debt —people would pay the Treasury for the privilege of lending it money.

All of this doesn’t even count the looming Social Security and Medicare crashes ahead—both will become insolvent. Social Security’s cash flow could turn negative any year now. So what does our government do? It recommends giving Social Security recipients a bonus check of $250, for a total of $14 billion. I have no doubt that many retired people have trouble making ends meet. But the pocketbook is empty.

A recent study estimated the uninsured health care costs faced by a couple at 65 years of age for the rest for of their lives. I don’t want to bum you out if you didn’t know this already, but it averages $197,000-- $260,000 if you include nursing home costs.

I once was moderating a conversation about leadership with a group of nonprofit and government executives. Everyone agreed that things need to change, but no one seemed willing to be the one to do it. “What’s the barrier?” I asked. “Why not change?” One person replied, “It’s politically risky. I guess we would all need to hold hands and jump off the cliff together.”

Ahh, the power of those invisible cultural tentacles that bind us all to the status quo. Maybe, I’m wondering, the same is true of saving. Why be the only stupe to save? After all, according to the marketing whizzes, we deserve not to save! One of the women at Centennial House suggested that there ought to be a payroll deduction for savings for health care expenses in our retirement years. Most of the group at Lakeview Commons really liked this idea— as if they want to be forced to save. Maybe a group jump over the cliff is precisely the answer.

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A big thank you to thank the folks at Centennial house-- Barb, Peggy L., Peggy B., Mary, Lisa, Linda and for a great conversation, and Janis for setting it up. Ditto for everyone at Lakeview Commons- Joyce, Jessica, Mary, Glenn and Audrey, and Andrea for making the arrangements.