Family
Holidays Can Be Fraught. Here's One Way to Make Them Productive
Rather
than settling scores with your siblings, or overeating, use this time to get
serious about how you're going to take care of your aging parents, a problem
made more difficult by our broken-down healthcare system.
Executive director, Ed Kaplan Family Institute for Innovation
and Tech Entrepreneurship, Illinois Institute of Technology
The holidays are always a
very complicated time for families. Most of us look forward to the annual
gatherings and grudgingly try to forget the imagined affronts, drunken insults,
petty squabbles and painful debacles of the past. I realize that this sounds a
lot like most of the office parties we've all recently suffered through. The
big difference, though, is that you can't really bail early when
you're stuck at your parents' home for the evening, trying to hide out in your
old bedroom and staring at decades-old debate trophies gathering dust on
shelves you ineptly installed sometime in the 60s or 70s.
This wave of mass selective memory that carefully edits
unfortunate prior episodes blankets the country at this time of year as we try
to be of good cheer. It's one of the greatest examples of how fantasy and
fiction, along with abundant optimism, continue to triumph over memory and
bitter experience. That doesn't include politics, where everything remains a
bitter experience.
So, we soldier on each year and hope for the best. Certain
delights and dilemmas are recurring. Seeing distant, but not distant enough,
relatives once a year is as much a regular December ritual as avoiding Uncle
Arnold's questionable creme brûlée, which he serves in an old Folger's coffee
can. And don't get me started on Frieda's fruit cake which, if inadvertently
dropped, would easily crack concrete never mind the dentures of anyone
foolhardy enough to bite the beast.
But these trials and tribulations pale in comparison to the
newest and toughest Christmas conversation, which is no fun for
anyone. This happens when the brothers and sisters of a certain age who
are lucky enough to have living parents gather to have "the talk"
about Mom and/or Dad's health, happiness, financial condition, and, most of
all, their future care. This is tough because the subject is so difficult to
address (with or without your parents in the room) and very timely because we
are the very first generation that is discovering in mass that we're going to
have to become our parents' parents. Millions of us are going to be required to
unexpectedly comfort and care for our parents for many years at the very same
time when we're facing the financial challenges of getting our kids into and
out of college/grad school and launched into the working world-- so we can keep
them from moving back home. Others, a little older, may have thought they
were on the cusp of a blissful and stress-free retirement, only to realize that
they're about to confront a bundle of new responsibilities.
Caring for our folks for a decade or so may not have been
foreseen or properly prepared for and, in some respects, this responsibility is
far from fair. But it's a fact today and one which more and more families will
need to deal with. And truthfully, most of us aren't prepared for the prospect
that our parents are living one misstep away from misery and the near certainty
that their care, problems and concerns will then become ours as well.
If this dawning realization wasn't frightening and painful
enough, it's compounded by the fact that their trials and tribulations are
merely a glimpse into the futures that we too can all expect. All the more
reason, by the way, to begin right now being exceedingly nice to your own kids.
And to consider three very disturbing lessons that our parents never bothered
to share with us; lessons you will learn quickly as you attempt to assist them
in navigating their golden, if somewhat tarnished, days.
(1) Hospitals aren't
places you go to get well. Get out ASAP.
Hospitals don't make you feel better. They're
insensitive and unfeeling factories focused on figuring out how quickly they
can get you out the door. The sooner, the better. And actually, that's the only
real favor they do for you because the whole process is a game of Russian
roulette, where limited, overworked and under-trained staffs try to keep you
from getting the newest staph infection before they send you home with a pile
of papers, incomprehensible discharge instructions, and a hearty slap on the
back.
Leaving your loved ones at the mercy
(hopefully not MRSA) of one of these medical bureaucracies is heartbreaking for
all concerned. But there's not much choice, unless you move into their
room and try to act as their advocate. Needless to say,
no one in the hospital likes that notion, in part because you might quickly see
that the call buttons are placebos-- no one really comes when you call-- and
that, because of severe personnel shortages, there's a new duty nurse almost
every day who knows practically nothing about your Mom or Dad. It's not that
they don't care -- the good ones clearly do. The problem is that they're
just prisoners along with their patients in a system that optimizes everything
but caring and curing.
(2) Insurance
"benefits" benefit the insurers, not the insureds.
The "can't-be-bothered" clerks and
sloth-like cretins who work for the nation's insurers are similarly
mis-incented. They get paid to first say "No" all day long
and hope that (after waiting an hour to speak to an alleged human) you'll take
their word for it, so they can get you off the phone. When you
squeal and appeal, you often get paid, but they still make it as slow and
painful as possible because they know time is on their side and that
you're probably tired, in pain, and on drugs.
And, by the way, they do the same scummy
things to your doctors. Some useless creep in Omaha decides what tests and
procedures your insurer will pay for and dictates the acceptable diagnoses to
the doctor-- not the other way around. Even the best physicians face barriers
to helping you get well when these people won't pay for the proper tests to
determine what's wrong with you in the first place. This is the kind
of support and these are the "benefits" for which you paid premiums
religiously for most of your life. You've become lost in the land of loopholes,
shabby excuses, clever clauses, and everything short of the simple
truth. If there's an industry with more scumbags per capita than
health insurance, I can't imagine what it would be.
(3) Social Security is
neither social nor secure, but it's unsettling for sure.
Parents planning to rely on Social
Security for much of anything will be shocked to find what a pittance they'll
be paid after a lifetime of work and contributions. Don't think of
it so much as a question of imminent insolvency--that will be our kids'
concern. Instead, with Social Security the greater insult is to be offered
peanuts with a straight face by a bureaucracy and a bunch of useless
politicians still set on squandering our financial future while lining their
own pockets at the same time. They don't need to depend on Social
Security, so what do they really care?
Trying to understand what you and your
spouse should be paid each month is an invitation to recurring torment, jumbled
jargon, and double-talk by people who can't even seem to read the mechanical
scripts set in front of them. This mess is made even worse (if that were
possible) by an immediate and unstoppable deluge of written notices,
indecipherable calculations, after-the-fact adjustments and everything but a
simple explanation or an answered phone call. This seems to be a plan to
further punish you for the audacity you initially exhibited by being so brash
as to ask a question. And the Social Security swamp is only a poor cousin to
the utter morass of Medicare or "Mini-care" as we like to call it,
since anything of importance to your health and every material cost seems to be
mysteriously uncovered.
So, be forewarned. This is
not a journey to be lightly undertaken or traversed by the faint-of-heart.
Nevertheless, it's a journey we will all need to navigate for our parents and
thereafter for ourselves and there's no better time than now to get the
conversations started.
