Bucking a decades-old trend of steering the elderly toward nursing homes to live out their sunset years, many communities are developing programs to assist older residents who want to remain in their own houses.
"As Americans live longer, a rethinking of widely accepted notions about the elderly is under way...Central to this thinking is a shift toward helping elderly people who want to stay in their own homes and communities, even if they are alone."
Reversing forty years of elderly-care trends that leveraged Medicare and Medicaid dollars to help fuel the dramatic growth of the nursing home industry, state and federal programs are slowly providing assistance to seniors and their caregivers to enable elderly residents to remain at home. "Vermont has begun offering seniors the choice of care in their houses and has even been paying family members to look after them, as alternatives to institutional care. Several states, including New Jersey and Texas, now have programs that take elderly residents out of nursing homes and help them move home again. In Georgia, a project called Aging Atlanta aims to make it easier for seniors to stay in their homes by, for example, paying their car fare when they need to go out."
[Editor's note: Although this article is only available to WSJ subscribers, it is available to Planetizen readers for free through the link below for a period of 7 days.]
FULL STORY: Staying Put at 96
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