We’re Taking Care of Mom
Back from another road trip over the weekend to spend time with me Mum in New Jersey who’s still recovering from a bout with pneumonia and bacterial infection over Christmas. She’s now been in a post-hospital rehab facility, Manor Care (a really nice place, as those kinds of health care facilities go) for a month and was making good progress until this weekend when an influenza “bug” went through the place. But all was well again by Sunday afternoon when me and Mrs. Avsec had to leave and return to Virginia. Mom was already looking forward to resuming her physical rehab sessions on Monday morning (She was “acing” the class until the “bug” came a calling!).
About ten years ago—Wow, how time flies!—I picked up Suze Orman’s book, Nine Steps to Financial Freedom while killing time in an airport on my annual ski trip to western U.S. Chapter 4 is entitled, Being Responsible to Those You Love, and a section of that chapter dealt with the topic of Long Term Care (LTC) medical insurance. Suze’s argument for LTC was that it’s significant protection for your financial health to protect yourself against the expensive—and getting more expensive every day—cost of long-term medical care (And she’s not just talking about when you get old—how would your family afford the care that would be necessary should someone in your family require months or years of medical care and rehabilitation following an accident of some sort?)
Anyway, after reading the book my wife and I purchased LTC policies for the two of us. Then I got to thinking about my Mom who by then was living alone in New Jersey, although in close proximity to two of my younger brothers. I had been living in Virginia since 1979 and our baby brother had made his home in Dewey Beach, DE, while the aforementioned brothers had remained fairly close to where we’d all grown up. Though me and my youngest brother, Chris, did not have children, our other two brothers, Tim (two boys) and Steve (two girls), were raising the next generation of Avsecs. The more I thought about it, the more I was concerned about (1) who would take care of Mom when the time came that she couldn’t do it herself, and (2) who would pay for it.
The way I saw it, with Suze’s help, was that with four brothers there was a way to address both questions so that (1) Mom always had the right care at the right time, (2) Tim and Steve and their respective families didn’t have to bear an undue burden of caring for Mom just because they lived close by, (3) the cost of Mom’s care would be fairly shared amongst the four of us, and (4) the cost of that care would not potentially devastate any of our families.
So we bought Mom a LTC policy way back when. Just last week, a representative of our company, John Hancock, sat down with Tim and our Mom, to gather all the information necessary to open a case file for Mom. Despite our best “prepping”, Mom thought this was the first step in our placing her in a nursing home. Fortunately, Tim and the rep were able to calm her fears and help her see that LTC pays for a full range of options, all based upon Mom’s needs. He also said that we (the Avsec brothers) were doing the absolute right thing by getting a case file opened now; even if she did not need anything now, when she’s released from the rehab facility—probably several more weeks—and we know more about her needs, the process is already started.
So, do you have LTC policies on your loved ones?
