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A broader look at seniors care

Friends of Medicare in Red Deer would like to respond to Talbot Boggs’ Moneywise articles (Advocate, July 2 and 8) that promote insurance and savings to deal with high costs of long-term care.

Friends of Medicare in Red Deer would like to respond to Talbot Boggs’ Moneywise articles (Advocate, July 2 and 8) that promote insurance and savings to deal with high costs of long-term care.

In Alberta, average life expectancy is now 81 years. Women can expect to live five years longer than men. Women will need long-term care for almost five years, men less than that. But people reaching 65 can expect to live longer than they earlier thought — a bit over 85, with women now expecting to live only three years longer than men, not five. These facts require flexibility in care programs and funding.

Boggs cites the Canadian Life and Health Insurance Association website. They use only the numbers favouring more insurance to cover lengthier disability and long-term care. Independently-funded North American data analysts concluded that real life care needs range from just under two years to almost five years.

The Alberta government pegs the number of residents 65 and older at 430,000 by 2020, and existing or planned long-term care spaces at about 15,000, about 3.5 per cent of the seniors population. But roughly two-thirds of long-term care beds are not occupied by those over 65. Those numbers fit North American averages, but across Canada we have life expectancies ranging from 69 to 83.

Highly mobile working families from different cultures are encouraged to come to Alberta. They have remarkably different ideas about who looks after disabled seniors. The Alberta government emphasizes privatizing long-term care facilities and programs. Tax-supported, publicly-operated care programs offer greater security, flexibility, responsiveness and quality than private insurance for corporate care.

“Long-term care policy worries caregiver” (Advocate July 12) tells about the negative impact, especially in winter, of transporting those needing care to the “first available bed within 100 km.”

It is a mystery why Alberta Health Services took so long to reconsider, and the policy is not changed yet.

Most of the data-crunching about senior care hinges around illnesses, accidents, genetic heritage and so on, but poverty is the single biggest determinant of need for care. That fact is rarely part of any equation.

Brenda Corney

Friends of Medicare

Red Deer Chapter

Red Deer