Joseph Andrey was 5 years old in 1927 when his impoverished mother sold him to the manager of a popular vaudeville act. He was 91 last year when he told the story again, propped in a wheelchair in the rehabilitation unit of a nursing home where it seemed as though age and infirmity had put a different kind of price on his head.
Craning his neck, he sought the eyes of his daughter, Maureen Stefanides, who had promised to get him out of this place. “I want to go home, to my books and my music,” he said, his voice whispery but intense.
He was still her handsome father, the song-and-dance man of her childhood, with a full head of wavy hair and blue eyes that lit up when he talked. But he was gaunt now, warped like a weathered plank, perhaps by late effects of an old stroke, certainly by muscle atrophy and bad circulation in his legs.
Now she was determined to fulfill her father’s dearest wish, the wish so common among frail, elderly people: to die at home.
Her father had been discharged by a hospital to a nursing home like this one, supposedly for rehabilitation, so many times that even she had lost count. The stays, long or short, had only left him weaker, harder to care for at home with a shrinking allotment of help from aides and more prone to the infections that sent him back to the hospital.
This time she had fiercely opposed his being discharged to anywhere but home, a small walk-up apartment in Manhattan that her parents shared for half a century before her mother’s death. Yet over her protests and his own, he had been transferred here anyway, to Jewish Home Lifecare in Morningside Heights, a sprawling institution an hour from where she lived. Later, he would ask, “Are you sure you didn’t put me here?”
“No matter what I do, they want you in a nursing home,” Ms. Stefanides told him, promising the placement would be temporary. “I think they’re making money off you.”
Records would show that her father’s case let the nursing home collect $682.48 a day from Medicare, about five times the cost of a day of home care.
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Fighting to Honor a Father's Last Wish: To Die at Home
Fighting to Honor a Father's Last Wish: To Die at Home
Do the taxpayers know what the go government is burdening them with?
ReplyDeleteToo many families go through this same nightmare.
ReplyDeleteA million dollars a year, all to neglect this gentleman's most basic needs, ignore his reasonable wishes, and unjustifiably sideline his loving, involved family member.
ReplyDeleteIf we don't start to apply important concepts like least restrictive alternative, person-centered practices, and public guardians of last resort, we will bankrupt this country with the age wave, which has now arrived.
If we can't do it out of compassion, let's do it out of common sense. If we can't do it out of common sense, let's do it for our own selfish sake, to save scarce public funds.
If we can remove these perverse incentives and perverse "professionals," we can make our elderly and disabled more safe, more secure, more clean, more happy, and save money.