Nearly 47 percent of California voters over the age of 40 surveyed say a close family member will need long-term care within the next five years, and about as many say they couldn't afford even one month of nursing home costs, according to a poll by the SCAN Foundation and the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research.
"A significant wave of demand for long-term care is headed our way," Bruce Chernof, MD, president and CEO of the SCAN Foundation, said in a press release.
Now in its third year, the poll surveyed 1,667 registered voters across California. In addition to the 47 percent who expect a family member to need long-term care, 47 percent of respondents said their household income declined in the past year and 22 percent said they've borrowed money.
Seventy-five percent said they could only afford three months of nursing home care. 47 percent, said they could not pay for one month -- an average of $6,800 in California, according to the report.
In California, home to the world's ninth largest economy and a state government with an estimated $16 billion budget deficit, the 65-plus population is expected to double to 8 million in 20 years.
So goes California so goes the country, it is said. Finding affordable long-term care solutions, at nursing homes or elsewhere, will be one of healthcare's larger challenges in the coming decades, and paying for it will be too.
One study by Georgetown University economist Harriet Komisar et al, estimates that 35 percent of all Americans who turned 65 in 2005 will end up needing institutional care at some point, while other research has found between 10 and 20 percent of nursing home residents are in institutional care for more than 5 years.
With national nursing home costs averaging $78,000 a year, according to a Metropolitan Life survey, some have called the expected enrollment surge in long-term care a crisis that should prompt reforms, with insurance as one viable solution.
William Galston, a Brookings Institution fellow and former Clinton Administration adviser, wrote recently in the politics and policy journal Democracy that current funding models aren't working. Long term care, Galston wrote, "is a classic insurable event" and "policy should shift dramatically toward forward-funded insurance based on individual contributions."