What Does it Take to Live in a Nursing Home?

I know other families somehow manage to place their elderly family member into a nursing home, but I can’t figure out how in the world they do it. In order for an elderly, dementia patient to enter a nursing home, they must first either consent to the move or a family member must be given official Power of Attorney over that person. The elderly person must sign this document himself or herself and it must be witnessed and notarized in order to be legal. Plus, if that isn’t difficult enough, especially if you are dealing with a difficult person who refuses to sign anything, the medical professional intends to get rich over this situation too.

In order for a person to be placed into a nursing home, that person must first be checked over by a doctor, in a three-part proceedure that first involves the dementia check, an oral test that is given to the elderly person; questions such as, who is the President?, and what year is this?, then a physical check-up is absolutely essential to satisfy the doctor’s curiosity about this and that and whatever, then a chest x-ray must be administered to be certain the person does not harbor something potentially hazardous, such as phlegm. Once all that is ruled out, I still wish you good luck getting your elderly family member into a nursing home within the same year.

If the elderly person in question is actually a nice person, there would be little difficulty in being patient while the endless red tape is slowly churned through the system, but when the person is extremely difficult to live with and is forced to live with you, that is another story altogether. To make matters even worse, the elderly person must fork over their life savings in order to live in a place in which they had no intention of living in the first place. That’s how it works, you see. First the person’s entire life savings is taken, including any moneys they may have set aside for their own funeral, and only then will the insurance start paying for the patient’s keep.

As a result, the families must scramble to spend that money before the nursing home can do so. This offends the elderly person beyond belief because they don’t understand why their family is suddenly in such a rush to get greedy hands on their life savings. You grab what money you can, and start spending it like mad so that the elderly family member can have a decent funeral, and warm clothes to wear and whatever else you can think of, and then, when you have whittled down that nest egg, you start hunting for a good nursing home.