In a perfect world children would take care of their parents if their parents live long enough to become like children (because they need someone to care for them) instead of institutionalizing them and bankrupting the government to pay for their care from strangers who don’t know them or love them and much of the time do not care and who don’t have time to care for them even when they do care.

Update on opening Aging With Grace, which is designed to be a lovely place for the parents described above to spend their day and get their health needs met:

We are making progress, but still waiting on the State to release Medicaid monies owed to us so we can pay for the move. Also need the State to give us permission to move. Do you know about the Certificate of Need program here in Kentucky? We had to go through the process and pay lawyers thousands of dollars to help us through the process in order to obtain permission from the State to open, and now that we are having to move, we have to pay another thousand dollars to ask permission to move. And the other adult day centers, who also have CONs can hire lawyers to try to block us if they so choose. And the process takes three months or more. They have a provision for an emergency CON relocation request, but for that we have to ask all the other adult day centers in the county if they will take our clients. If they say no, then we can open in a new location immediately. Of course, all the other adult day centers were more than happy to take our clients. The only other way the CON office will allow an emergency relocation request is if our client’s health and safety were at risk if we did not immediately open. I do believe this to be true because I am sure that at least two of the other three adult day centers do not give good care. One of our clients who is mentally sharp but physically disabled was visiting another adult day center in town to try it out when she saw another one of our clients at the center also visiting to try it out.  He went right out the door into the yard and nobody got up to follow him or check on him, and he needs constant supervision because he has late stage Alzheimer’s and tries to escape. And they have younger mentally and physically disabled people there who can be dangerous. I used to work with that population and I love them, and God loves them, but they do not belong with frail seniors because of the safety hazard they pose.