Individuals regularly under-estimate the likelihood and duration of their lifetime long term care needs. As of 2019,

• 47% of men age 65 and older, and 58% of women in the same age bracket, will need long term care during their lifetime. That’s essentially 50% and 60%!
• Those stays aren’t short – the average number of years of care for women is 2.5 years, and 1.5 years for men, with 21% needing long term care for 2-4 years, and 13% for more than 5 years.
• In this same age bracket, ages 65 and older, 33% across the genders will need nursing home care during their lifetimes.

In a press release on May 25, 2022 by the American Health Care Association, which often collaborates with the National Center for Assisted Living, some key findings of their “State of Skilled Nursing Facility Industry” report include:

• Nursing homes are often very reliant on fixed-rate payers such as Medicaid. In this inflationary environment, that type of financial scenario breaks quickly.
• It is anticipated that we could go from 16% of nursing home residents nation-wide being at risk of displacement, to 47%, for financial reasons due to potential legislature cuts to Medicare and Medicaid plus increasing nursing costs. That’s over 400,000 nursing home residents.
• The nursing homes most likely to close for financial reasons are those with residents with higher clinical complexity. That is, the ones who need the nursing home the most.

But now long term care has a new problem. Staffing. While with every COVID surge we’ve been regularly hearing about the big short term implications of problems staffing hospitals, and even between surges hospital staffing is being challenging as staff are often burned out and feel attacked by their own communities, we haven’t been hearing about the challenges of staffing in long term care facilities.

In a May 19, 2022 article about a relatively local (northwest Wisconsin) facility, there aren’t enough people to do the work: everything from nurses to laundry, food service and housekeeping, to maintenance, there are not people willing and able to do the job for the wages being offered. The article cites that over 300 nursing homes have closed their doors since 2020, and another 400 are at risk of closing here in 2022 – 3% of the nursing homes in the US.

Now add needing to provide long term care for a loved one, while being a member of the sandwich generation (still working and parenting), the burnout problem we just talked about two days ago would take on a whole new dimension of pain for thousands of working families.

Very few families want to talk about long term care plans

Currently, over half of people have no long term care plan, and when there isn’t a long term care plan in place, that caregiving often ends up on the shoulders of family members. In the future, even with a plan in place, long term care in a professional facility may simply not be available to be had. It’s a good time to share the above articles with your family members, and to discuss not only the long term care plan A, but also plans B or C.