The price of getting old

The Times ran an impassioned piece this week by one Liz Penny (a pseudonym), complaining about her experiences in arranging care for her elderly parents. Basically she hates just about everything -- the hospitals, the care homes, the lack of advice, the cost...

I've been through some of the same experiences, but I'm not nearly as angry as Liz Penny seems to be. Both my mother and my aunt are now in care homes, in each case after long spells in hospital. My mother was clearly seen as a bed-blocker. On the say-so of a physiotherapist, she was discharged back to her own home just a few days before Christmas -- and wound up back in hospital inside a week. As for my aunt, the hospital experience was better -- but two of her friends contracted c. difficile while visiting her!

Things are much better now that they are both in long-term care. The homes, at opposite ends of the country, are modern and well equipped. The staff lie along a spectrum from the merely dedicated to the positively angelic. The food is monotonous, my mother carps about it all the time, but the fact is that she has regained all of the weight she lost while languishing in hospital.

There is one key difference between the two of them. My mother is in a position to pay for her own care, mainly because she owned her own home, which we have now sold. My aunt has always lived in council housing, has minimal savings, and is consequently having most of her care expenses paid for by the council. This has not been difficult to arrange.

It's clear from Liz Penny's article that she deeply resents the fact that her father was required to pay for his own care at the outset. She acknowledges that he extracted £50,000 from the value of his home in order to provide funds for this purpose, but is scandalised that he actually had to spend it! I've seen lots of examples of people getting angry at having to sell their parents' home for this purpose -- there goes the inheritance! (My sister even heard a man on the radio saying that he should be allowed to have his father euthanased, rather than having to sell the house to pay for care!) But think of it this way. If I'm going to be taxed to pay for Liz Penny's dad's care, so that she can benefit from the value of his home, who's going to pay for my care when I get old? Or for Liz Penny's, since she presumably won't want to sell the home when her time comes, either.

I seem to write about issues like this, raised by the aging of the baby boom quite often. It's one of the biggest issues facing society. I was recently told by my pension adviser that the actuaries will base my pension on the assumption that I will live to the age of 84. I have an uncomfortable feeling that medicine is allowing us to prolong our existence, but not really extending our lives.