Grossly generalizing a whole generation, but chances are, those Baby Boomer parents were in debt up past their eyeballs, and that $1.5MM home is going to get sold along with all their other assets in order to square everything up. This generation may be having fewer kids, but it's going to be leaving fewer net assets behind.
I gotta say that one of my goals in life is to maximize my debt at death :) It's a delicate thing, of course, because dying with no cash or credit would suck. But hey.
Be very careful. Elderly without children to check in on them are seen as ATM's.
Extract as much money as possible and don't care about the person. Drug them so they don't complain, and schedule as many medical procedures as possible. Use providers that give you kickbacks, and charge very high rates for things like haircuts, or even drug delivery (why buy in advance, when you can deliver, and charge for it, that same day).
All this changes when they have children who check in on them, ideally every day.
> because dying with no cash or credit would suck.
That all depends on if you retained your mental faculties until the end.
If yes, you are going to want lots of cash! You will need to pay someone to do so many things you used to do yourself.
If no, then any remaining cash will rapidly be taken from you anyway, so there's no point in holding on to it.
My advice? Have children and love them. You will be much happier as an elderly person if you do that.
Here in the UK, medical care is free at the point of use. Prescription medicines are free to to anyone over 60, including delivery if needed. Residential care homes are not automatically free, but your costs will be fully paid by the local authority if you lack the income and capital to pay the fees yourself. All care homes are regulated by the Care Quality Commission.
If you lose the capacity to make your own decisions and have not granted someone lasting power of attorney, the Court of Protection may appoint a deputy to supervise your affairs. If you have no suitable friend or relative to act in this role, a panel deputy will be chosen; these deputies must be approved by the Office of the Public Guardian. All deputies must file an annual report with the OPG, listing and justifying every financial decision they make. If these decisions are not in the best interests of the individual, the deputy can be removed or criminally prosecuted.
I'm not saying that elder abuse is non-existent in the UK, but a lot of the issues you mention are failures of government rather than facts of life.
You seem to be arguing that a) old age in the US is a horrifying nightmare of financial exploitation and b) everything about the US system is fine and dandy. Which is it? Is financial exploitation of the elderly by legal guardians a relatively rare occurrence that public bodies are doing an effective job of preventing, or are there grievous systemic failings in the US health, social care and legal systems?
Yes. I have also worked as a welfare advisor, with direct involvement in cases involving issues of mental capacity, legal guardianship and residential care.
>It's not any different.
Clearly it is very different. There's no financial incentive here for over-treating elderly patients - NHS trusts are not paid per treatment. If a doctor or hospital chooses to administer unnecessary treatment, they have less money in their budget and their performance targets are negatively impacted. A service provider cannot arbitrarily rack up fees, because that's not how we fund health or social care.
In many states in the US, a completely unvetted person can apply for guardianship of someone they have never met. In many states, there is effectively no oversight of legal guardianship due to a lack of funding. In many states, guardianship is administered by local courts with no specific expertise.
I did. On the first page of results I found some tabloid news articles, a Scientology front group and an NHS summary of the research paper they were all citing. The paper concluded that, while neuroleptic drugs are prescribed more frequently in care homes than in community prescribing, it is not clear whether that is due to inappropriate prescribing or selection bias.
I am not arguing that the UK is a utopia, but I cannot reconcile "Elderly without children to check in on them are seen as ATM's" and "Extract as much money as possible and don't care about the person" with my knowledge and experience of elderly care in the UK. Parts of our system are chronically under-funded, we have unreasonably long waiting times for many services, there's a shortage of care workers, but I've seen nothing to suggest that elderly people are being used as cash cows.
You have a point, to an extent. Coverage and welfare state benefit programs have continued to move considerably higher however. The US is now at the OECD middle on its welfare state spending as a percentage of GDP.
Half of Americans receive coverage via the government in some form. 70 million Americans are on Medicaid & CHIP (~22% of the population). Then you have Medicare, VA, SS disability, numerous state & smaller federal programs, and then partial subsidies via the ACA.
If you make minimum wage in the US, you're going to qualify for free healthcare in nearly all states via Medicaid. Via the ACA, the cost with subsidization when you're a little bit higher economically still comes out to tens of dollars per month (which is not a terrible price given how expensive healthcare is in the US, although the coverage is still not what it should be).
The bottom 25% is mostly able to get free or cheap healthcare. The next 25% bracket gets frequently royally screwed, they're stuck in a bad spot and often bounce in and out of having coverage. The top ~50% are covered by their employers commonly.
But I'm not the trusting sort. I have guns, and I know how to use them. And I'm planning to kill myself before I lose it completely. I have a cache of morphine and phenobarbitol. So maybe I'll die alone, but with luck, not exploited.
> And I'm planning to kill myself before I lose it completely.
This is a common plan, but it doesn't work. When that moment arrives when you would want to, you no longer have the mental faculties to do it.
Before then, you'll be feeling like everything is going just fine, so why end it?
Assisted suicide or DNR's don't really work without family members to enforce them. Medical providers are incentivized to keep you alive: Both morally and financially (you can chose which counts for more depending on how cynical you are, but either way the two motives are in sync).
But re medical providers, why would they keep me alive if there's no money left? It's a pretty good bet that even AmEx would start declining charges, at some point.
It's for people who are destitute. They insist you spend all your own money first, and then you are covered fully for everything, with a small monthly allowance from social security.
Providers are happy to help you spend all your own money, and then be fully covered.
That reminds me of something Old Bill Burroughs wrote about in his last trilogy. But then, he had some outlandish fantasies about reincarnation through simultaneous suicide and conception. Or asexual spiritual materialization. So it was best to die in prime health.
