Posts Tagged: elder care
As Latinos age, the need for Spanish-speaking caretakers grows
“It's necessary to help her with everything: bathing her, dressing her, feeding her,” said her husband, Luis Sierra. “It's very hard.”
Latinos are the fastest growing group of people 65 and older in the U.S. today. And the number of elderly Latinos with dementia is growing, too. Already, there aren't enough bilingual, bicultural services to go around. That means increasingly, Latinos are going to have to leave work and other responsibilities to care for ailing family members.
Luis Sierra was already retired when his wife started to need care. That's not typically the case, said Caroline Gelman, a social worker who does research on Latinos and Alzheimer's at Hunter College in New York.
“While most caregivers for other groups, particularly white groups, tend to be the spouse, in Latino populations, they often are adult children,” Gelman explained. “That means that they have many competing obligations: work, their own families, their own children.”
A Met Life study found that caregivers 50 and older who leave the work force to care for a family member lose about $300,000 in income and benefits over a lifetime. To keep working, caregivers need adult daycare for their relatives, counseling, and other services. But those often aren't available in Spanish, Gelman says.
“The service doesn't exist so people aren't using it so they're finding other ways of supplementing the care that they need,” Gelman said. “Then the policymakers can say, ‘See, they use their families. They don't need this help.'”
That's changing. Both the Alzheimer's Association and the Latino Alzheimer's Alliance are starting bilingual support groups and other programs across the country. That also saves the healthcare system money, because it's cheaper to care for people in their own homes.
For the past two years, an in-home health care aide who speaks Spanish has come by the Sierras' apartment every day. Luis Sierra that's better than putting his wife in a nursing home. “It makes my wife happy to be surrounded by people telling her they love her,” Sierra said.
It's hard to put a dollar value on that.
Source: Published originally on Marketplace Morning Report as As Latinos age, the need for Spanish-speaking caretakers growsby Eilis O'Neill, November 11, 2015.
Two-thirds of Californians unprepared for costs of elder care
Two-thirds of middle-aged Californians worry that they won’t be able to cover the enormous cost of nursing home care – now over $70,000 a year – and Latinos in particular feel vulnerable, according to a report the SCAN Foundation and UCLA’s Center for Health Policy Research.
![Elder-Care Elder-Care](http://ucanr.org/blogs/LatinoBriefs/blogfiles/9032.jpg)
Regardless of political party or income level, survey participants “were worried about the costs of growing older,” says the UCLA summary. “Two-thirds (66 percent) of respondents said that they are apprehensive about being able to afford long-term care. Sixty-three percent worry as much about paying for long-term care as they do about paying for their future health care.” Medicare does not pay for most long-term care.
Overall, a whopping 85 percent of all voters said they have no long-term care protection, such as insurance or eligibility for supportive services, including in-home care. Sixty-one percent of voters with household incomes over $75,000 said they worry about covering these costs.
Latinos Especially Vulnerable
Among key findings are that two-thirds of those surveyed said they could not afford three months in a nursing home (now averaging about $6,000 per month). Nearly nine of 10 (88 percent) of Latinos surveyed said they could not pay for such care.
In fact, while six in 10 of those surveyed said that they worry they won’t have enough income to make financial ends meet, 84 percent of Latinos said they fear that scenario.
More than half of Latinos surveyed – significantly more than whites, Asians and African Americans -- said they have cut back on saving for retirement in the past year. And nearly half had to borrow money from a family member or friend, or received monetary assistance from them in some way.
Source: California Progress Report, “Two-Thirds of Californians Unprepared for Costs of Elder Care,” by Paul Kleyman for New America Media, August 21, 2011.