Assisted Living Finance

Financial Assistance for Assisted Living and Senior Living Care

Several government subsidies are available to fund senior housing. However, the reality is that these amounts are limited and will impose restrictions on what care you receive and where you receive it.

§                         Medicare: Neither Medicare Parts A nor B offer coverage for comprehensive ongoing long-term care. Medicare A (hospital insurance) may cover costs for a semiprivate room, meals, nursing and rehab services, medications, and medical supplies in a skilled nursing facility for the first 100 days after being released from hospitalization for an acute illness or injury. The first 20 days are covered at 80 percent, with the rest of that time period covered at decreasing rates. It never covers a private room nor services in an assisted living residence. Medicare B only offers reimbursement for covered services you receive from a doctor. 

Ask Medicare is designed to support and assist caregivers. Ask Medicareoffers a wide range of helpful information for the nearly 66 million Americans who provide help to an aging, seriously ill, or disabled family member or friend. Ask Medicare offers tools that helps caregivers and those they care for make informed health decisions. 

§                         Medicaid: Medicaid, which provides federal health-care assistance to low-income Americans, is the biggest payer for room, board, nursing care, and social activities in nursing homes. Many, but not all, states now cover some assisted living services under their Medicaid programs; however, these fluctuate widely in terms of eligibility requirements, and dollar amounts of coverage. The Senior Assisted Housing Waiver provides eligible low-income adults a choice of receiving senior living care services in a community-based setting rather than in a nursing facility. Bear in mind that faced with budget deficits for years to come, states are more likely to cut, rather than expand, these programs. 

§                         Housing and Veterans Subsidies: Seniors with annual incomes under $12,000 may qualify for U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development 202 and Section 8 senior housing, which provide rent subsidies that can help pay for the room-and-board portion of both independent living and assisted living environments. The Department of Veterans Affairs also provides some skilled and intermediate-level care to veterans in its own residences, depending on space availability. 
 

§                         For more information on benefits, visit Federal Benefits for Veterans and Dependents or check out the VA's benefits fact sheets. 

§                         Life Care Funding Group (LCFG) assists people in need of funds to cover the costs of senior housing and long term care. LCFG specializes in converting the death benefit of an in-force life insurance policy into a long term care benefit to cover the costs of skilled nursing home care, assisted living, home health care, and hospice.

  Additional Resources and Advice for Financing Senior Living:

§                         Center for Long-Term Care Financing

§                         AARP

§                         National Association of Insurance Commissioners

§                         America's Health Insurance Plans

Senior Living Care Insurance

Long-term care insurance is perhaps the best way to ensure you can afford to pay privately to receive the most choice in housing environment possible from your provider of choice, whether it's independent living, assisted living, or another housing option. Experts suggest consumers should be looking at long-term care insurance at 40 and own it by age 50. When choosing an insurance provider, consider the following tips:

§                         As with any insurance, read the fine print on the policy and ask questions.

§                         Compare at least three different insurers.

§                         Verify each company's financial strength through independent rating systems such as AM Best.

§                         Review the company's rate history for stability.

§                         Check to see if the policy is tax-qualified, in which case premiums may be deducted under medical expenses if you itemize your deductions.

§                         Select an inflation-protected policy to ensure sufficient coverage when you file your first claim years from now.

Technology for Memory Care

Playing brain-training video games may help reverse the natural decline in cognitive abilities among older people, according to scientists.
They found that 60-year-olds who played a custom-designed video game for 12 hours over the course of a month improved their multitasking abilities to levels better than those achieved by 20-year-olds playing the game for the first time. The subjects retained those improvements six months later.
"Through challenging your brain, you can drive plasticity and improve its function," said Adam Gazzaley of the University of California, San Francisco. His team's findings suggest the ageing brain is more "plastic" than previously thought, meaning it retains a greater ability to reshape itself in response to the environment and could therefore be improved with properly designed games.
In their experiment, published on Wednesday in Nature, Gazzaley's team asked participants to play a game the researchers had designed called "NeuroRacer" which involved driving a car along a hilly, winding road. At the same time, they had to press a button whenever they noticed a target sign – a green circle, say – appear at the top of the screen. Another version of the game involved just pressing buttons when the signs turned up on screen, without having to drive the car.
The researchers measured the "multitasking cost" for the participants as the change in accuracy from doing the sign task by itself, to doing the sign task and driving the car at the same time. A -50% cost, for example, meant the participant had a 50% reduction in their accuracy as a result of having to multitask.
Gazzaley first assessed groups of healthy people at different ages and found, unsurprisingly, that multitasking abilities declined with each extra decade of life from the age of 20 to 80: 20-year-olds had an average multitasking cost of around -25%, 30-year-olds had an average cost of around -40% and 70-year-olds had a multitasking cost of more than -65%.
The subjects, aged 60 and 85, played the game for an hour three times a week over the course of a month. As a result, the team found their average multitasking cost dropped dramatically.
"They went from a 65% cost to a 16% cost," said Gazzaley. "These games exceeded both that of an active control group as well as the non-contact control and they also exceeded levels attained by 20-year-olds who only played the game a single time." The improvement was still there six months later.
Cognitive tests carried out by the researchers before and after the sessions with NeuroRacer also revealed improvements in their attention and working memory, areas of cognition that were not directly targeted by the video game.
Peter Etchells, a psychologist at Bath Spa University who studies the effects of computer games on the brain, said that Gazzaley's work was "a great example of how video games tailored to specific populations can be used to improve mental health. We hear a lot about how video games might be bad for us, but it's not really a simple, black-and-white story."
Robert Howard of the Institute of Psychiatry at Kings College London said that reports of ways to deal with cognitive decline tended to generate a great deal of interest in older people and those who worry that they might be in the early stages of disorders such as Alzheimer's disease. But he added: "We are still a very long way from being able to recommend cognitive training as a preventative or treatment measure."

Gazzaley said his findings were not directly comparable to existing commercial video games and he was keen for people not to overinterpret the results.
"One thing I'm cautious about is that it's not blown out of proportion in that the conclusion from this is that video games are a panacea for all that ails us," he said. "The devil's in the details and this was a very carefully constructed game that was targeted to a known neural deficit and a population."
But he said that the results could be extrapolated to other situations. It was a reasonable hypothesis, he said, to speculate that training with video games might help people of all ages keep up their cognitive reserves and that it might even be useful for people with the many neurological and psychiatric conditions that also affect cognitive function.
Tom Kirkwood, director of the Institute for Ageing and Health at Newcastle University, said training with video games is known to result in improved cognitive performance. "It would be surprising indeed if this was not underpinned by measurable changes in neural activity," he said.
"It would also be surprising if training effects did not persist for a while. Just think of all those music teachers who would be out of jobs if this were not the case. In this connection, it is a bit surprising that the authors did not compare the benefits and persistence of training effects in different age groups. It would have been especially interesting to know whether older adults were significantly less trainable than younger adults, or if the results were relatively comparable."
Kirkwood added that, in experiments of this kind, it was tough to control for the benefit that came from reinforcement of self-belief when engaging with a new challenge. "Those in the 'multi-tasking' group will inevitably have been aware that they were doing something quite demanding which might have generated wider psychological and cognitive benefits."

Adult Day Care Dining Done Right

The age-old business proverb, "What was good enough to get you there isn't good enough to keep you there, should be the manta for modern-day dining services in your adult day care center and assisted living facility . An option is food is assembled on trays in the main kitchen, then removed from the tray prior to service in the dining room. This dining service is an upgrade to the traditional food being served on trays.

The kind of changes a center makes to its dining service should depend totally on its clientele. One of the most frequent customers in senior citizen dining are  Independent Living, Assisted Living, Nursing facilities, Short-term Rehab, and finally Adult Day Care participants."

Most healthcare residents in Adult Day Care,lived through the Great Depression. While Independent Living and rehab patients are more likely to be Baby Boomers.

Community-Based Interventions with hospitals

Community -Based Interventions with hospitals are effective in reducing rehospitilization and hospitalization , according to a recent study from the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). The study, which was implemented via 14 state -based Quality Improvement Organbizations (QIOs) found a six percent coorelation in such reductions.

Systematically coordinated community based efforts with hospitals and other providers to improve the quality-of-care transistion and avoid rehospitalization.

The Communities in the study averaged 5.7% in reduction of hospitalization over the two year period of the study.

Some o fthe succesfful strategies includes: helping pateints and family members become actively engaged in their transitions by keeping a persoanl record, knowing the red flags for trouble, ensuring the recieve the right medications and the right follow-up care.

Adult medical day care centers are such a community based program which workes with hospitals to provide these services.

Brain Stimulation used to treat Alzheimer's

A pacemaker-like device was recently implanted into the brain of a patient with early stage Alzheimer's disease at Johns Hopkins's Hospital in Baltimore. The device deliverers deep brain stimulation and is seen as a possible means of boosting memory and reversing cognitive decline. Instead of focusing on drug treatments, many which have failed, this research focuses on the use of low voltage electrical charges delivered to the brain. As well as John Hopkins's hospital, other sites performing this operation are University or Pennsylvania, the University of Florida, Banner Health System in Phoenix in Arizona and the University of Toronto in Canada.

Community Based Services Grow the fastest

In 2011, skilled nursing facilities accounted for the largest share of elder care services. However, home and community based services ( adult day care and home health) are projected to acheive the fastest growth. Advances will be driven by continued state and federal efforts to shift Medicaid payments awaay from skilled nursing to more cost effective community based services. Additonally, many older adults prefer to age in place, remaining in their homes as long as possible.

Grants for Starting an Adult Day Care Center

Social Services Block Grant

The Social Services Block Grant is a federal program that awards funds to states for the provision of social services. Although states determine which agencies and projects can receive the funds, the United States Department of Health and Human Services reports that one type of program supported by these grants is adult daycare. Furthermore, the grant is intended to help individuals become independent, self-sufficient and to reduce neglect. Organizations starting an adult daycare center can learn more about opportunities through their states by contacting their state departments of social services.

Administration on Aging Grants

Because many people consuming adult daycare centers are the elderly, the Administration on Aging offers a number of grants that can be used to fund adult daycare centers where the elderly reside. For example, in 2011, the AOA made funds available to State Units on Aging for the creation of a statewide services network capable of caring for dementia patients. The administration also offers grants to nonprofit, educational and academic organizations for research and services in the area of respite care and caregiver support, nutrition, research and the prevention of elder abuse. Organizations and states wanting to create adult daycare facilities may be eligible for some of these funds, depending on what kind of residents they will serve and what types of services they will provide.

Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Grants

The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation offers grant funds to public universities, nonprofit organizations and other public agencies for the improvement of health-care services, including adult daycare. Although the foundation prefers to grant programs that can be easily assessed, such as research and training initiatives, organizations that want to start or reorganize adult daycare facilities may be eligible for grants to fund a part of their projects, such as staff training or innovative programs.

Department of Veterans Affairs Grants

Since many veterans are in need of adult day services, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs offers project grants for the creation of community programs for eligible veterans. Adult daycare centers that will offer services to veterans and agree to receive per diem compensation from the VA may be eligible, as long as they offer all of the medical services required by the federal agency. Organizations interested in creating such a program should visit the VA website for more information.