Free Republic

* New Jersey's nursing homes are battling COVID-19 once again as new variants spread through the US. *One in every four facilities has reported an outbreak over the past week, according to state data. *The surge comes with both hospitalizations and deaths from the virus steadily rising.

As many as 80% of aging adults in America lack the financial resources to pay for two years of nursing home care or four years of an assisted living community. That’s according to a new study from the National Council on Aging (NCOA) and the LeadingAge LTSS Center at the University of Massachusetts Boston. Additionally, 60% of older adults — or 24 million households — would not have the funds to pay for in-home long-term care, despite the fact that they would prefer to “age in place,” per a report from NCOA. Researchers analyzed 2018 data from the Health and...

Two women accused of running a fight club at an assisted living residence in North Carolina are being spared jail time despite being convicted of encouraging dementia patients to fight and then filming the results. Police said that Marilyn Latish McKey, 35, and Taneshia Deshawn Jordan, 28, were arrested in October 2019, following a report in June of that year of elderly abuse at the Danby House in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. McKey pleaded guilty to two counts of assault on an individual with a disability and Jordan pleaded guilty to one count of assault on an individual with a disability,...

President Biden holds his first official news conference since taking office.

64-year-old Terry Robison is a working-class retiree trying to make his money last throughout the remainder of his life. And Holiday Inn is the clear winner. That’s according to a Facebook post from Robison in which he evaluated the per-day cost of staying in a retirement home for seniors and the daily cost of staying at a Holiday Inn. Robison found out that when applying the senior discount he qualifies for, the Holiday Inn would cost less than $60 per day. The senior home, on the other hand, cost around $188 per day, making it more than three times more...

Three employees at a North Carolina assisted living facility were arrested after police said they ran a fight club with elderly residents with dementia battling it out against each other. The women were accused in court documents of watching, filming and even encouraging a fight between a 70-year-old woman and a 73-year-old woman at the Danby House assisted living and memory-care facility in Winston-Salem, Fox 8 High Point and other local media reported.

Meet Wally, a four and-a-half foot long emotional support alligator with razor-sharp teeth who likes to make new friends. Wally belongs to Joie Henney, host of Joie Henney’s Outdoors, a hunting and fishing show that ran from 1989 until 2000 on ESPN Outdoors, Fox and other outlets.

Two employees of a North Shore assisted living center were booked with cruelty to the infirmed after they "cheered on" one resident as he beat up another, the Tangipahoa Parish Sheriff's Office reported Wednesday (Aug. 1). Latricia Johnson, 20, of Ponchatoula, and Tykeshia Berry, 30, of Hammond, were also booked into the parish jail with being a principal party to an aggravated second-degree battery and criminal conspiracy. The two suspects neglected to obtain medical treatment for the 22-year-old victim of the beating, who sustained serious injuries to his face and leg, the Sheriff's Office reported in a news release.

Approximately one in five Americans are over the age of 65, and that number is quickly growing. As baby boomers reach retirement, many decide to make the move from a primary care physician to a geriatrician – primary care doctors who have special training in offering health care to seniors. The health care needs of people change as they age, and many begin to experience new medical conditions such as arthritis, diabetes, renal failure, or heart disease. Some inevitable signs of aging take place over time, such as a slower metabolism, and lead to a decline in physical activity. Some...

When an assisted living home in California shut down last fall, many of its residents were left behind, with nowhere to go. The staff at the Valley Springs Manor left when they stopped getting paid — except for cook Maurice Rowland and Miguel Alvarez, the janitor. "There was about 16 residents left behind, and we had a conversation in the kitchen, 'What are we going to do?' " Rowland says. "If we left, they wouldn't have nobody," the 34-year-old Alvarez says. Their roles quickly transformed for the elderly residents, who needed round-the-clock care. "I would only go home for one...

Rarely does an investigative report manage to unite industry executives, academics, and regulators in such a way as the recent Frontline/ProPublica Life and Death in Assisted Living. Unfortunately for the producers and writers, they have united all three elements in expressing how their report misrepresented the industry. The Frontline show originally aired on July 30, 2013, on PBS for one hour, and the accompanying four-part series written by A.C. Thompson (who hosted and co-produced the Frontline show) appeared concurrently in ProPublica. They claim to have spent over a year on the project. It is unclear when they developed their...

For family members, it is often the most difficult and painful decision they will face: to accept that a loved one — a parent, a spouse, perhaps a sibling — is technologically impaired and should no longer be allowed to live independently, or come near a computer or electronic device without direct supervision. The time has come to place that loved one into the care of an Assisted Computing Facility. But you have questions. So many questions. We at Silicon Pines want to help.

The actual Tour de France ended yesterday. A gutsy little Spaniard, Carlos Sastre, hung on to win, after his best performance ever in the final time trial. The experts said he didn’t have the strength and stamina to hold his lead against a stronger, and favored competitor in that trial. But he ultimately won by 58 seconds, which is a decent margin in the Tour. Like most Americans, I root for the underdog. But that’s not the Tour de France I came to talk about, today. The day before the Tour ended, Barack Obama had the second-to-last leg of his...

The retired Supreme Court justice's spouse, John O'Connor, has had Alzheimer's disease for 17 years, and after moving into an assisted-living center in Phoenix, he began a romance with a fellow patient also suffering from the mind-debilitating ailment. But the justice isn't jealous - the O'Connor family believes the love has given John, 77, a new lease on life. "Mom was thrilled that dad was relaxed and happy and comfortable living here and wasn't complaining," their son Scott O'Connor, 50, told Phoenix's KPNX-TV. Scott said that when his father recently arrived at the Huger Mercy Living Center, he was depressed....

...Seventy-five thousand dollars is the average yearly cost of living in a nursing home, whether you pay out of pocket, whether you have long-term-care insurance, or whether you’re on welfare and your stay is paid for by Medicaid. (In 2005, Medicaid paid an estimated $54 billion of the $122 billion national expenditure on nursing homes.) Few elderly people or their families make a deliberate, considered decision to move to a nursing home. More often, institutionalization follows an accident or sudden illness. The broken hip is a typical trigger. First the patient goes to the hospital, and then to the nursing...