[leoqa]

I’m not particularly sympathetic to retirement home narratives that paint each person as a lonely, incompetent senior wasting away. I witnessed first hand how my mother spent her adulthood partying instead of providing and now it’s become a critical issue for our family to provide for her. Ultimately I don’t expect my children (or staff-journalist) to project pity on me for my circumstances.

I run a weekly route with MealsOnWheels and deliver food/perform wellness checks to many people whom are homebound. There are much worse fates for seniors than a community home with social programs and meal service.

I think it is everyone’s duty to buy long-term care insurance (perhaps the government should provide this, as we will all need it). I also believe you must provide for the retirement you expect.

[BeetleB]

LTC is risky, as others have pointed out.

My company offers one that claims to be reliable (owned by an insurance company that's been around for over 100 years, albeit not in the LTC space).

The one thing I didn't like about them: They don't adjust for inflation. So if you sign up for a $100K plan, you'll get $100K - which will worth a lot less by the time I need it.

[justmedep]

Isn’t that adjusting for inflation and not for cost of living?

[BeetleB]

Fixed - thanks.

[red-iron-pine]

> I think it is everyone’s duty to buy long-term care insurance (perhaps the government should provide this, as we will all need it)

this is called Social Security

[ethbr1]

Demographics and decreased immigration would like a word...

[notmyjob]

The problem with LTC insurance is it’s likely to go belly up and you are at the end of the day dealing with an insurer whose business model involves denying valid claims. All of that is assuming you can actually get LTC insurance. Good luck if you are over 50. It’s like the private form of social security, a Ponzi that’s approaching its moment of truth.

[leoqa]

You’re probably correct (I’m 30 and don’t have a policy) but I can’t think of any financial instrument that would guarantee skilled nursing ($4-8k/month in MCoL) for 10-20 years. No one in the bottom 90% of American earners can afford that drawdown even if they saved considerably.

[nostrademons]

That’s sorta the point, and the problem. There’s a dependency ratio problem brewing: there are simply not enough working-age people to care for the old people who will need care. No amount of financial instruments can paper over this reality - they will just go bankrupt (eg insurance policies, social security) or steadily drop in value relative to the cost of care (401ks and other financial instruments) until the price of LTC equilibrates to actual capacity. Anyone not in the percentile that actually has eldercare capacity will simply have to go without, much like the price of housing has risen to shut out Millennials that are not in the income percentile needed to get one of the few scarce houses for sale.

[spwa4]

No worries, the EU (and UK) governments have gone ahead and taken the only real way out of this conundrum: researching robotic labor to take over for this ... and defunded it.

[Retric]

That’s not the only solution, curing dementia would largely solve the manpower issues here.

Rapid population decline is a separate issue that makes this problem seem much worse. In other words, if elderly care works in a steady state population then it’s a symptom here not a cause.

[spwa4]

You have seen the protests in France? Raising the retirement age will not go over well, to put it mildly.

Bloquons tout!

[bluGill]

Most people won't need it for long and so the risks average out to a more reasonable cost. However it is still thousands and people buy cheap not best coverage when they need it so that is what the market provides.

[supportengineer]

Every insurer's business model involved denying valid claims.

By maximizing the float you can maximize risk-free returns

[joules77]

Retirement is a stupid concept.

One of my Grandfathers just stopped taking medication and going to the docs. And died quite peacefully within a couple years of retiring. Death and decay is just natural and quick. While my other grandfather has been kept alive 30-35 years post retirement popping a tray full of pills everyday, having gone through dozens of surgeries and has had hopeless quality of life post retirement.

The med-industrial complex is a run-away train that is detached for any moral system. It can't even produce any morality anymore. Because its not efficient or rational to do so :)

[stetrain]

Perhaps it's the idea that we all must work full time with 10 days of annual leave until we reach the point of needing pills and medical assistance to live comfortably that is the issue.

[lo_zamoyski]

That depends. Retirement as passage into idleness? Sure. Many people who retire piss away the remainder of their lives because they don't know what to do with themselves. They get depressed, and they become lonely, because they become isolated. Children move away, spouses die, friends move away or die. Couple this with suburban planning where you can't do anything without a car (something the elderly are less likely to be able to operate) and where there is no town center, certainly not one congenial to the social life of the neighborhood or town. With the decline in church membership, you don't have that option anymore, one that also dealt with questions dealing with the end of life (if you view death as the absolute end, then your life was hopeless to begin with; retirement and old age simply strip distractions and illusions effectively).

But this is separate from the question of retirement as such, or the question of aging. Your grandfather, I presume, only refused to take medication and medical treatment, which falls under "extraordinary care", and this is morally licit. Had he refused food or offed himself intentionally (or with "assistance"), that would have been a different matter.

[dh2022]

Are you volunteering yourself and your kids to not taking medication and seeing doctors in your old age? Or are you volunteering "other people"?

[groggler]

Seems like a nasty interpretation to assume a grandfather is other people and make it a straw man argument..

We could just as well ask:

Are you volunteering yourself and your children for 30 years hooked up to tubes with partially effective pain medication?

[mikestew]

Are you volunteering yourself and your children for 30 years hooked up to tubes with partially effective pain medication?

No one spends 30 years hooked to tubes. Ask better questions, or at least dial back on the hyperbole if you'd like a reasonable discussion.

[groggler]

I don't think that is accurate.. but my point was the hyperbole of assuming the pathological case.

[dh2022]

Your point is very difficult to understand. I answered your question even though I did not understand its relevance.

[dh2022]

Huh? To answer your question: yes, I absolutely volunteer myself and my kid to be alive as long as possible.

If possible I would volunteer you and your family to stop getting medical care when all of you get old.

Fair?

[josefritzishere]

Some of us get old and tired. Retirement is a necessity. Your opinion will change with age on this one I expect. retirement has existed really since humans lived past their 40s. (1700s) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retirement

[ceejayoz]

> retirement has existed really since humans lived past their 40s

We've always lived past our 40s. We just stopped having a bunch of people die in childhood (or birthing children).

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20181002-how-long-did-anc...

"If one’s thirties were a decrepit old age, ancient writers and politicians don’t seem to have got the message. In the early 7th Century BC, the Greek poet Hesiod wrote that a man should marry “when you are not much less than 30, and not much more”. Meanwhile, ancient Rome’s ‘cursus honorum’ – the sequence of political offices that an ambitious young man would undertake – didn’t even allow a young man to stand for his first office, that of quaestor, until the age of 30 (under Emperor Augustus, this was later lowered to 25; Augustus himself died at 75). To be consul, you had to be 43 – eight years older than the US’s minimum age limit of 35 to hold a presidency."

"As a result, much of what we think we know about ancient Rome’s statistical life expectancy comes from life expectancies in comparable societies. Those tell us that as many as one-third of infants died before the age of one, and half of children before age 10. After that age your chances got significantly better. If you made it to 60, you’d probably live to be 70."

Neanderthal elders probably took on lighter-duty tasks as they aged just like today's elders do.

[OkayPhysicist]

Humans have always lived past their 40s. You've misunderstand life expectancy statistics, because human age-at-death forms a bimodal distribution: A lot of kids and infants die (especially historically), and then your body starts falling apart in your 50s. So while the average life expectancy at birth for a lot of history might have been in the 30-40 year span, it has never been common for people to die in their 30s. Because once you make it to ~15, your life expectancy is another 30-40 years. And if you make it to 30, your life expectancy was still another 25-30 years.