No Joke

If you’re active online, at some point you’ve probably gotten one of those anonymous joke messages that circulate over the Internet. Some of them are pretty funny. One that showed up in my mailbox was titled “Read ‘Em and Weep,” and listed song hits from the ’60s and ’70s with new lyrics for aging baby boomers:

Mrs. Brown, You’ve Got a Lovely Walker
How Can You Mend a Broken Hip
I Get By with a Little Help from Depends
A Whiter Shade of Hair
I Am Woman, Hear Me Snore
It’s My Procedure and I’ll Cry if I Want To

I laughed when I read it, but unhappily, too many on the list come pretty close to the truth for those of us in that age group.

Another recent message had the same effect. This one, titled “An Alternative Retirement Home,” outlined the sender’s plan for getting on a cruise ship in his old age instead of heading to a nursing home. The plan doesn’t sound bad:

• “I will have as many as 10 meals a day if I can make it to the restaurant, or I can have room service, which means I can have breakfast in bed every day of the week.”
• “They have free toothpaste and razors, and free soap and shampoo. TV broken? Light bulb need changing? Need to have the mattress replaced? No problem! They will fix everything and apologize for your inconvenience.”
• “I will get to meet new people every seven or 14 days.”
• “If you fall in the nursing home and break a hip, you are on Medicare. If you fall and break a hip on the ship, they will upgrade you to a suite for the rest of your life.”
• “They will even treat you like a customer, not a patient. An extra $5 worth of tips will have the entire staff scrambling to help you.”

“So,” the message ends, “don’t look for me in a nursing home. Just call shore to ship.”

I thought this e-mail was a ha-ha joke, too, until I realized it could be based on a recent study by an instructor at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine. Lee Lindquist, MD, an attending physician in the divisions of geriatric and general internal medicine at Northwestern Memorial Hospital, compared costs over a 20-year life expectancy after moving to assisted living facilities, nursing homes and a cruise ship, including the costs of treating acute illness, Medicare reimbursement and other factors.

She found that the net costs of cruise ship living were only about $2,000 higher ($230,000 vs. $228,000) than those associated with the assisted living facilities but resulted in higher quality over the 20-year period. The seniors Lindquist interviewed routinely rated the utility for cruise ship care higher than for traditional options, and the retiring baby boomers she queried felt that the idea would be a valuable option for their future. She said with this option, seniors might even look forward to a time when they become less independent.

Whatever you think about the jokes or the study — or the actions Congress is taking in reform of Medicare and Medicaid — it seems our country’s attention is beginning to focus squarely on “the senior situation.”

My plan? I’m not booking cruise tickets just yet (although exotic travel and the meal thing are tempting). I’m waiting on our nation’s legislators — and working toward helping them — to understand that home is where I want to spend my senior years. I hope you’re doing the same.