Your Bridge to Assisted Living At Home
You've spent your whole life planning: career, college fund, retirement . . . Now is the time to plan for "aging in place." This means you choose where you live as you get older, and most often, your choice will be your own home. Your home plus good planning can be the solutions to your comfort, health, safety, and independence, even with the changes that come with age. The key is to plan now, find affordability, have services that come to you, and to have a team fully capable of adjusting to changes that growing older can bring.
With age, we need increasingly more healthcare and more complex healthcare. Through that experience, we learn about the fragmentation of healthcare delivery and the challenges of navigating it all. Help To Seniors, headquartered in the Detroit Metro and serving much of Michigan, specializes in building bridges between the services that facilitate aging in place. More than just caregivers, the home-visiting doctors and nurse practitioners sent by Help To Seniors diagnose problems and order solutions. The in-home nurses monitor your health, help manage medications, and help make sure you can be successful with your healthcare plans. The therapists, such as physical, occupational, and speech therapists, come as needed to protect your mobility and other aspects of function and ability, maximizing your independence. Finally, when needed and only as much as needed or wanted, Help to Seniors can send private-duty aides who help with activities of daily living such as medication reminders, mobility assistance, homemaking, bath safety, and more.
By focusing first on managing healthcare as effectively as possible, keeping chronic diseases and age-related changes in check, and resultantly maximizing independence, Help To Seniors plans to hold down their clients' costs and modulate the need for personal assistance. Research shows that patients who use home health in a timely fashion, often with Medicare paying 100%, lower their overall healthcare spending. Patients who refuse home health prove 25% more likely to end up in the hospital over the next year and have healthcare spending that is $15,000 higher per year.1,2
Help To Seniors helps clients maximize Medicare and health insurance benefits. Medicare covers home doctor visits with normal co-pays and deductibles. For qualified seniors, Medicare often pays 100% for in-home nursing and rehab. Help To Seniors focuses on using these services proactively, in a coordinated fashion, to maximize individual health and independence. This results in lower out-of-pocket expenses for non-medical home care and for avoidable medical care.
More than half of Michigan's Medicare beneficiaries have enrolled in Medicare Advantage plans as opposed to original Medicare. Younger Medicare beneficiaries often enjoy benefits repackaged in ways that suit them better, but Medicare PPOs reduce freedom of choice and Medicare HMOs do that even more so. For elderly patients approaching a need for assisted living at home, this loss of freedom of choice can prove highly problematic in insidious ways. People with Medicare Advantage plans receive less home health care and have poorer health outcomes. Leaning toward the exact opposite of the Help To Seniors plan, Medicare Advantage patients exhibit lower rates of improvement in mobility and self-care, and they suffer more emergency room visits. The loss of freedom of choice creates situations where Medicare Advantage patients are more frequently steered into lower quality home health agencies and nursing homes.
Elderly patients need to give serious consideration to the role of freedom of choice in their ability to age in place on their terms. Commonly accepted Medicare Advantage PPOs provide more choice than PPOs with smaller networks and more choice than Medicare Advantage HMOs. The highest freedom of choice is afforded by original Medicare. Resultantly, seniors with original Medicare get more home health, home health from higher quality agencies, and see more improvement in mobility and self-care from home health.
In Michigan, the average cost of assisted living runs over $60,000 per year, and this often does not include nursing or therapy. Private-duty aide services can create significant cost savings compared to assisted living. Private-duty aides may cost as little as $280 per week for clients with low-intensity service plans, but aides can also be available for 24/7 care. On the other hand, the challenge that many seniors and their families face is that Medicare and other health insurance do not pay for assisted living or routine "attendant" care focusing on activities of daily living.
A type of policy called long-term care insurance will help with the costs of private-duty aides and senior helpers, but many families do not carry such insurance. In 2020, less than one in ten seniors had long-term care insurance. However, the fact of the matter is that seven out of ten adults age 65+ will need some form of long-term care in their lifetimes. Starting long-term care insurance around age 50 helps keep premiums low. Regardless, given the prevalence of the need for long-term care in retirement, planning, budgeting, and saving for this need is a must. In addition to long-term care insurance, other financial vehicles that can help with this planning and budgeting include Health Savings Accounts, IRAs (Roth and Traditional), 401(k)s and employer-sponsored accounts, hybrid life-insurance LTC policies, annuities with long-term care riders, reverse mortgages, and, of course, personal savings.
As stated earlier, Help To Seniors starts reducing long-term-care costs by protecting health and ability through proactive healthcare. On the other hand, when retirees finally need attendant care, refusing it runs the risk of lower health, lower quality of life, and injury. Help To Seniors makes sure the evaluation of the need for home care aides is part of routine care for seniors. Additionally, that need can increase over time. Therefore, reassessment and adjustment are also routine. In addition to protecting patients personally, timely initiation of attendant care vastly lowers the risk of caregiver fatigue, a situation with unpaid family caregivers that often leads to avoidable institutionalization of the senior.
Even when personal aides are needed, the Help To Seniors program maximizes affordability in two key ways. One, Help To Seniors is not a franchise or chain. As a Michigan-based healthcare provider, it does not build franchise fees into the costs. Moreover, because Help To Seniors was purpose built to create a bridge to assisted living at home, there are no programs designed to drive clients into service plans that are more than exactly what is needed. Help To Seniors plans to start early and start small with attendant care, and to scale up that private-duty aide service only as an individual's need for that service changes with age. Customized service plans based on individual needs minimize unnecessary costs.
On the other hand, Help To Seniors works to be 100% available to clients, making nurses on call available 24 / 7 and having personal aides who work at patients' homes during mornings, days, nights, weekends, and holidays, up to 24 hours per day.
Long-term care facilities hold out the promise to take care of everything, but they are often filled with complaints. Research shows that home care can be as effective, if not more so, than institutional care in maintaining or improving health outcomes for older adults. Patients often experience higher satisfaction levels due to personalized care and the comfort of being at home.3
With both institutional care and the commonly available home care programs, the changes of age often result in transitions in caregiving "silos," or, worse yet, changes in location. Help To Seniors creates a unified continuum of care. However, clients are free to pick providers both inside and outside the Help To Seniors program. Ideally, patients will start the first time traveling to a doctor for skilled care becomes burdensome, whether that be a normal situation or one brought on by illness or injury. Home visiting doctors can make healthcare more personal and more accessible. Then home-visiting nurses add follow-up, making medical care more comprehensive. When there is rehab potential, home-visiting therapists protect your function and ability. Finally, when having a personal aide at home, or during outings, improves safety or quality of life, this is provided. With these primary program services in place, Help To Seniors will also coordinate other healthcare to create that bridge to assisted living at home. For instance, Help To Seniors can help coordinate home-delivered pharmacy, home-delivered medical supplies, new equipment such as mobility and bathroom safety equipment, etc.
With Help To Seniors, the frequency and intensity of these home services can go up or down, always according to patient preferences, guided by a thorough examination of patient needs. Doctors can visit anywhere from yearly to daily. Nursing can range from on-call, to episodic and intermittent, to continuous private-duty nursing. In-home nursing can provide care from simple medication management all the way to high-tech nursing, including ventilator or tracheostomy care. Similarly, home care aides can be available a few hours per week to 24 hours per day. Help To Seniors makes home care aides available mornings, days, nights, weekends, and holidays. All of this care transition can take place while seniors remain in their own homes, with the care coordination of Help To Seniors.
