Posted on 08/08/2007 12:45:06 PM PDT by voletti
Pondicherry, India —- After three years of caring for his increasingly ailing mother and father in their Florida retirement home, Steve Herzfeld was exhausted and faced with spending his family's last resources to put the couple in a cheap nursing home.
So he made what he saw as the only sensible decision: He outsourced his parents to India.
Today his 89-year-old mother, Frances, who suffers from advanced Parkinson's disease, gets daily massages, physical therapy and 24-hour help getting to the bathroom, all for about $15 a day. His father, Ernest, 93, an Alzheimer's patient, has a full-time personal assistant and a cook who has won him over to a vegetarian diet healthy enough that he no longer needs his cholesterol medication.
Best of all, the plentiful drugs the couple require cost less than 20 percent of what they do at home, and salaries for their six-person staff are so cheap that the pair now bank $1,000 a month of their $3,000 Social Security payment. They aim to use the savings as an emergency fund, or to pay for airline tickets if family members want to visit.
"I wouldn't say it's a solution for everybody, but I consider it the best solution to our problem," said Herzfeld, 56, a management expert who made the move to India with his parents, and now, as "care manager rather than the actual worker," has time for things like bike rides to the grocery and strolls in the botanical gardens with his father.
(Excerpt) Read more at ajc.com ...
Which means the only people who can securely do business and own property in Mexico are those who are politically connected. Which is why corruption in Mexico will not end peacefully -- the oligarchs NEED for Mexico to stay corrupt so that they and ONLY they have the ability to do business
Which is not to say that you couldn't RENT an apartment in such a retirement complex. I wouldn't do it any other way. Keep your assets in a Swiss bank or some such.
Agreed. But then your rent money goes to pay off the mortgages of the oligarchs and keep them in power. No, the best idea is not to commerce with criminals, even if the deal is attractive financially.
I don't think so. The guy moved his parents there and went with them. He did it to be responsible -- and if the story's to be believed, he made a good decision.
If it were a "play" for socialized medicine, it would have centered on all the elderly who divest themselves of their assets to qualify for Medicaid. We have a real problem here and this guy found a free-market solution.
It hardly glorified socialism.
Daily massages? I’m not sure I see the problem here.
Also, this avoids the problem of the “drop in.”
Perhaps I should have been more specific. If his parents can get a higher standard of care by moving to India, and they approve of the move (assuming that they're mentally fit to approve, otherwise, they need to have the decision made for them...) then I am all for it. Particularly if the guy moves there with them - shows that he's serious about the situation, and not "outsourcing his parents", like the headline implies.
I think that the actual article (or maybe the author's opinion?) is a all about socialized medicine. Nearly every paragraph mentions the "crippling cost" of health care in this country.
Is the cost of care here high? Sure. But, given the choice, I'll take some care that's expensive, vs no care at all.
I'll be curious to watch how this plays out - I'd not heard of Europeans headed to India for care. Makes total sense, I'd just not heard of it. I wonder what demand will do to the cost of care there?
The headline makes it sound bad. But if you read the article it shows a different story. The guy had previously lived in India and he went with them. Sounds like a good solution to me.
Not necessarily - I have several clients whose parents are in a similar situation, and they don't report anything about sub-standard care. There was a boom in the construction of such facilities in the '90's and early this decade (everyone knows that the population is aging), and these places need to fill beds. Since the marginal cost of taking care of 1 more patient is less than what Medicaid pays (even if the profit is less than someone paying full boat), they take the patients. Besides, most of the residents have Social Security income and all of that gets paid in before Medicaid kicks in (even if there is a Miller Trust - because those trusts have to pay all but about $50/month to the facility).
However, you are right that this guy has certainly found a good place to take care of his parents, even if it is half way around the world. Good care is good care, and if he doesn't mind being there, then more power to him.
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