Home Care

The dilemma of distance -- boomers have parents who live in, for example, Florida. The oldest boomer is 69. They’re not all that healthy. The still-living parent(s) may be even less healthy. In this age of medical specialization and long distance families, many aging women living alone: they need to see doctors, perhaps multiple doctors. Even if the children of aging parents live nearby, experiencing enhanced intergenerational proximity (!), the aging parent may ultimately live alone. With life expectancy for woman now averaging 88+, it is safe to say that older boomers are still involved in coordinating the care of their aging parent/mother. And they’re doing it from a distance – since the boomer woman with a career may not reside in Florida. Consider that Florida is now on track to become the 3^rd largest state – with population growth primarily from migration. The state now has a median age of 74 for its 65+ population, one-quarter of that population widowed. But the dilemma of distance criss-crosses the country from California to Maine, from upstate New York to New Mexico.

Maybe you have Ann Clinton stuck in your mind too.  This woman and her husband spent $351,424 plus $4600 per month for the 'security' of having access to the continuing care of a CCRC. The 'continuing' of the CCRC was in one direction – she discovered that returning in a motorized wheelchair from the nursing home section to the independent living bingo game engendered big protest – from the other residents as well as management. You may have seen this yourself – people putting wheelchairs and walkers at a dining room door and limping in so that they could eat with friends in the 'independent living' dining room. These are well-documented -- if not well-understood -- policies. The message, perhaps constructed by CCRC marketing?  Independent living residents don’t wish to see people who are not as 'independent' -- or at least who don’t appear as independent as themselves.

Incubators and contests -- do they enable innovation?  Paul Krugman's interesting article about GE’s competition to find a new design raises a question about how to boost innovation and lower its cost. If you read the article, entitled 'Complexity is Free' – you will discover how a simple contest, fielded internationally, generated a design improvement at almost no cost for GE: "The winning prize pool [was] $20,000, spread out across 8 finalists, with awards ranging from $1,000 to $7,000 each." So for $20K, GE got something it wanted, layered that something into a design process that enables continuous revision to designs without new infrastructure investment (the 'free' in the title.) Does anyone else find it interesting that there was no internal engineer who could figure out how to design a lighter-weight bracket component -- and that a contest was required? Or was this a publicity stunt to generate good will for GE?