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Free Q & A Teleconference – Ask the Experts about Aging Parents
Free Question & Answer Teleconference – Ask the Experts about Aging Parents
We would like to invite you to our free Q & A teleconference, where you will have a personal opportunity to get your questions answered.We are passionate about offering information and solutions to the worst difficulties shared by those with aging loved ones. We will also be learning from you about what are the most common problems you face with your aging loved ones.
CAUTION: This teleconference will not provide specific legal or medical advice! We are not a substitute for seeking advice from your own doctor or lawyer on your matter in your state. If you need specific legal or medical advice, we urge you to obtain it from your own lawyer or doctor.
Tomorrow
When: July 26, 2012
Time; 4:30-5:00 pm PDT
Where: Please call in to our teleconference at 605 475-4825#
We sincerely hope you can attend. Oh yes the above number is a toll charge to some.
We both look forward to hearing from you.
Until next time,
Carolyn Rosenblatt and Dr. Mikol Davis,
Aging Parents.com
Hidden Truths About Reverse Mortgages
Hidden Truths About Reverse Mortgages
Who would ever think of a reverse mortgage being a form of financial elder abuse? There are some hidden dangers in these products and you need to know about them. Unsuitable mortgages are abusive. They are not right for some people over 62.
Mikol and I recently attend the San Francisco 7th Annual Conference on Elder Abuse. An expert panel spoke about reverse mortgages, drawing back the curtain that cloaks the truth: they can create some new problems the broker isn’t telling you about. We learned a lot and we want to share this with you. The ads make them look so great. Vacations, living a great lifestyle, happy couples, smiling at their good fortune. Rewards are repeated again and again.
Sincere movie stars of a certain age make the commercials believable. You can get cash now. It’s so easy. Just get your reverse mortgage and your problems will be solved. Pay off debt. Have fun.
What’s wrong with this picture?
Sincere movie stars of a certain age make the commercials believable. You can get cash now. It’s so easy. Just get your reverse mortgage and your problems will be solved. Pay off debt. Have fun.
What’s wrong with this picture?
A reverse mortgage is more debt and one of the most expensive forms of credit you can get.
They are very complicated and hard to understand. Know these risks and dangers of reverse mortgages:
The Elder Might Need A Care Home in the Future
Say your parent gets a reverse mortgage and a few years go by. What happens when they have to move out of the home into assisted living or a nursing home? The mortgage becomes due. Now, there is the expense of paying it off, besides the high cost of the assisted living or nursing home care. It can leave an elder homeless.
It Can Affect Any Dependent in the Home
If the elder who happens to need care in a facility has non-borrowing family members in that home, the loan is still due. Anyone left in the home must move out, go to a care facility or be taken in by someone else. That can include a non-borrowing spouse, child or grandchild. They are “tenants” according the the rules of reverse mortgages and they have to leave the home when the elder goes.
It Can Go Into Default
If an elder with a reverse mortgage fails to pay property taxes, to keep up insurance on the home, or fails to maintain the home, he is in default. The lender can then foreclose. Lenders are in a good position to purchase such properties cheaply and then flip them for a good profit. Elders who are low on cash may fail to pay home insurance premiums or property taxes. If they are getting forgetful, they might not maintain their properties.
When the Elder Dies, the Heirs Must Pay Off the Loan
The entire principal, plus accrued interest and service fees must be paid in full to the lender before the heirs can rightfully take possession of the home. This debt may exceed the actual market value of the home. If they can’t pay the debt, the lender has the right to foreclose and sell the property. Low wealth heirs are not likely to be able to pay the debt and those homes fall into foreclosure. Goodbye inheritance.
The Amount the Lender Will Loan is Limited
There are seemingly irrational formulas used to calculate how much a borrower can get on a reverse mortgage. If an elder lives into one’s 90’s, becoming more common these days, there is a risk that the amount loaned will not be enough to sustain the elder who needs long term care at home. The elder can run out of money to make the loan payments, go into default and end up homeless and impoverished. This is a real risk, particularly for anyone who thinks it’s a dandy idea to take out a reverse mortgage to pay for home care providers. If the elder borrows, say, $200,000, and ends up needing care 24/7, that reverse mortgage cash she got will be exhausted in about two years or less. Then what? Default, foreclosure and Medicaid paid nursing home.
According to Norma Paz Garcia, Senior Attorney for Consumer’s Union of the United States, there is no suitability standard for reverse mortgages for seniors and we need better standards. She warns that all seniors need viable and truthful counseling to warn of the negative consequences and potential harm of reverse mortgage products. She urges borrowers to consider any other possible alternatives to raising cash such as a forward mortgage equity line, inter-family loans, local government loans or public benefits.
So what’s the bottom line? Consider a reverse mortgage an option of last resort. If you or your aging parent thinks it’s a good idea, get advice from a competent financial planner and elder law attorney before doing anything. Recognize that your aging loved one might not be in perfect health to the end of her days and that care at home might cost more than a reverse mortgage could cover, especially over a period of years. There just might be less costly, better ways to borrow when elders need it.
Until next time,
Carolyn Rosenblatt
Are Our Aging Parents Taking Too Many Pills?
Did you ever ask your aging parents how many prescriptions they are taking?
The answer could surprise you. Sometimes there are so many pill bottles, no one is keeping track of all of them. Parents’ memory loss, too many drugs to track easily, lack of money to pay for them and other factors can mess up the best of medical intentions when prescriptions are written.When I worked as a visiting nurse many years ago, it was not uncommon for me to go into an elder’s home and find shoeboxes of pill bottles, some duplicates for the same drug, with different doctors prescribing them. Some of the medications were incompatible with each other. My job was to notify the various MD’s of the problem and instruct the aging person what to stop taking and what to keep taking. The problem, sometimes called “polypharmacy” still persists.
Doctors are often in a hurry and seniors may be too intimidated to insist that their list of medications be reviewed. Worse yet, when various medications are available to treat a particular condition, the drug representatives have visited the doctors’ offices and offered free samples of the most expensive ones. Those may not the only choice and they are not what the elder can afford, but those expensive items may be what are most often prescribed.
What’s the answer to this?
We think an underutilized resource is the neighborhood pharmacist. It may be someone from a chain drug store or from any other kind of pharmacy, but the pharmacist, unlike the MD, will take the time to compare medications. The pharmacist can offer suggestions as to less expensive alternatives and brands. It’s their role to explain what the medication does, explain the side effects and help the person understand the importance of taking what is ordered.
“The pharmacist can be the patient’s advocate with the MD” says Susan Gordon, licensed Pharmacist for 15 years with CVS in Tampa, Florida. “The pharmacist can give the elder or adult child advice about less expensive options the MD does not know about. The MD may not know what it costs to fill the prescription he/she has just given to the senior.”
The Medicare drug benefit is limited and many medications are not covered. Elders like my 89 year old mother in law, Alice, have to pay a lot out of pocket each year for drugs they need to take. For our aging parents on fixed incomes, expensive medications are not in the budget. If we encourage them to find one reliable source of information about what affordable alternatives are available, there is a better chance that they will take what is prescribed for them.
Even though elders may like to shop around for the best drug prices, the advantage of a “home pharmacy” can be the prevention of filling duplicate prescriptions for the same drugs. It can also be an ed
I encourage the use of one place for storing data about all our parents’ prescriptions, where the pharmacist can be a reassuring source of information about not only what elders must pay for out of pocket, but side effects, drug incompatibilities and prescriptions for the same condition from different doctors they see. Says Pharmacist Gordon, “With a home pharmacy, the patient can ask about all the meds they are taking, regardless of where they got the prescriptions filled”.
An alarming number of hospitalizations are related to failure to take medications as prescribed or taking medications incorrectly. Though our aging parents are already a responsibility for their adult children who are involved in their lives, it is reasonable to ask them about their pills and where they get them, especially as they start to show signs of declining health.
I work with many adult children who tell me that their aging parents won’t take medications their doctors have ordered even if they can afford them. Whether they take the prescribed meds or not is the parents’ choice and no one can force them. Anyone has the right to decline treatment. But, we can encourage, support and try to make it easier for aging parents to comply with what the doctors want them to do to treat their conditions. We do so in the hope of enhancing their quality of life.
Our respectfully watching over their medication regime and encouraging the use of one place for getting their prescriptions filled can literally be a life saver.
Until next time,
Carolyn Rosenblatt,
Son Hit With Aging Parent’s $93K Nursing Home Bill
Hello, again. Carolyn and Mikol here. We came across an article about a shocking case involving a son being stuck with his mother’s nursing home bill. We wanted to give you a heads-up, as most people would never expect this. Could this happen to you?
John Pittas’ mother entered a nursing home for rehabilitation following a car crash. After she left the nursing home, she moved out of the country. His mother’s $93,000 bill at the home was left unpaid. The mom had applied for Medicaid, which would normally pay the bill if she couldn’t.
The mom’s Medicaid application did not get approved in enough time to satisfy the nursing home, and it sued her son for the bill. The state of Pennsylvania, like 29 others in our country, has something called a “filial responsibility law”. Those laws require that spouses, children and even parents of needy adults support the indigent. These laws were rarely ever enforced. The nursing home decided to enforce it rather than have Medicaid do what it was designed to do.
The trial court found for the nursing home. Mr. Pittas appealed. He argued that the court should have considered Medicaid or going after his mother’s husband and her two other adult children. Astonishingly, the appeals court not only agreed that the nursing home didn’t have to wait until the Medicaid claim was resolved, it also found that the nursing home could choose any family member it wanted to when seeking payment for the bill.
There is an adage in the law: You can’t legislate morality. However that is exactly what the Pennsylvania courts in the Pittas case did. If a son or daughter has the money and wants to pay for mom or dad’s care, that’s an upright choice. But what if they choose not to pay? What if they have their own expenses, kids in college or a retirement they want to fund? Since when is it okay to unfairly discriminate against a financially successful family member? Mr. Pittas’s tax returns, bank statements, and other personal data are now presumably public record.
Here’s the unspoken part of the picture that really rankles. Some parents worked hard all their lives and never made enough money to pay for expensive things like nursing home care. I can’t justify any court making their kids pay.
A quarter of adult children, mostly baby boomers are already providing personal care or financial assistance to aging parents, according the the Met Life Mature Market 2011 study of the Caregiving Costs to Working Caregivers. These boomers are already out nearly $3 trillion in lost wages, pension, and Social Security benefits for themselves. Now some states want to saddle these same adult children with the nursing home bill too??
The pressure is on in all states to deal with the explosive costs of Medicaid programs. States are not in trouble because of unnecessary spending for indigent sick folks. They are in trouble because people are living longer, and having more health care needs as a result of longevity. Our aging persons who are in nursing homes for any length of time typically can’t pay the cost of being there. The solution is not to force the high cost of care onto their children. Historically, taxpayers have borne the burden of helping our indigent pay for care. I can’t see any other choice, unless you think it’s okay to throw the sick and needy out into the streets.
Yes, it takes taxpayer money to fund Medicaid and cover Mr. Pittas’ mother’s nursing home stay. So be it. She was living on an income of $1000 a month.
What are the takeaways here?
First, if your parent is low income, see an elder law attorney who has expertise in Medicaid in your parents’ state and get the application going now if they qualify. If assets need to be transferred to avoid losing a home, you need to do this years before your parent needs Medicaid.
Next, if there was ever an argument for buying long term care insurance, a state’s filial responsibility law is it. If your parents are young enough and healthy enough to be insurable, get them to buy it or buy it for them. If you just want to “think about it”, they may become unmeasurable while you drag your feet.
If you aren’t sure about what your responsibility is or may be for your aging parents, get competent advice before any more time passes. We offer coaching programs to get you through your aging parent transitions. Learn about how the law, your parents’ health needs and your own emotional health can be managed to avoid costly mistakes.
Until next time,
Carolyn Rosenblatt & Dr. Mikol Davis
AgingParents.com