Sara Mansfield Taber’s piece, “Caring for Mom, Mum, and Maman”, in the Outlook section of the Sunday, January 8 Washington Post, hits the nail right on the head. Sara compares her personal experience as a caregiver to the experience of friends in England and France. This is our cohort, folks! We are caregivers. Her comparisons make the point very clearly. We need a very thorough overhaul of our approach to caring for older Americans.
Sara lets us know it can be done because she cites examples of systems that make sense and work. She doesn’t use the words, but the working systems are Aging in Place. Services and infrastructure helping people be happier in surroundings they love with the care they need. Sure there is cost, but there is also value. Her really personal examples are familiar to us.
Where Michael Moore hits us on the head, Sara takes us gently but clearly and succinctly. We need a radical departure from what we have. The current health care debate teaches how hard it is to depart from our current morass of inefficiency and expense. How hard it is to upset the financial paths and players from lobbied entitlement.
This piece points us in the right, plausible direction. Whether we have the political will to get there is another question. How we organize to demand and how we make such sweeping change needs to be explored.
Louis Tenenbaum, one of the nation's leading authorities on aging in place, is the founder of HomesRenewed, a coalition of business, consumers and nonprofits, driving policy and investment to increase the number of age-friendly homes.