Les and Marjorie Runyon celebrate a family Christmas on Dec. 25, 1983. Medicaid was their salvation. (Photo courtesy Keith Runyon)
The front-page headlines in the last few days have been jarring: “Medicaid Cuts May Force Retirees out of Nursing Homes.”
While much of the battle over Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful” tax bill for billionaires is theoretical to many of us who’ve always had health insurance and coverage for things like rehab and even nursing homes, this information hit home for me.
In 1999, over Labor Day weekend, my mother had a paralytic stroke that left her entire right side lifeless. Although her mind was unimpaired, most of what she cared about in life was deeply affected. Since early childhood she had been a pianist, eventually a very fine one trained at the University of Louisville. Her days at the keyboard were ended. So was her ability to walk, to take care of basic chores, even to bathe. So was her ability to spend time with her grandchildren, and to entertain the family for holidays.
Yet her heart, at age 75, was still strong and her will to live was, at least for a time, unflinching. But within six months or so, after long treatment in a rehab center, Medicare required that she go home or go on full pay.
My parents lived the American dream in the postwar era. They were comfortably off, owned their own home, and educated their two sons — with no student loans. But even in 1999, they couldn’t afford, for very long, the steep prices that nursing homes charged. So Mother came home in a wheelchair, where she remained under my aged father’s care until he could bear it no longer. The family housekeeper, who had cared for my grandmother until she died, was as old as Mother, so she wasn’t up to the task either.
One night in April 2000 the call came from my brother that my father was so ill that he was unable to rise from the living room sofa. Within an hour, he was in an emergency room, dying of congestive heart failure.
He was brought back to life by one of Louisville’s great cardiac surgeons, Morris Weiss, but for the rest of his life he was frail and dependent on medicine, walked with a cane, and was unable to take my mother back home. Alas, nursing home care was the only option for her,
My father was always very private about his finances, so I never quite knew when, but his savings (and Mother’s) dried up and she was transferred to Medicaid. He was even reluctant to speak of it. We all thought Medicaid was for indigents, or the terribly disabled.
Turns out, Medicaid was for us. I learned that a lot of nursing homes welcomed Medicaid residents. An attorney who specialized in issues involving the aged advised our family. Then an elderly aunt died and left Mother some money. Immediately she went back onto private pay until those dollars were gobbled up. So back on Medicaid she went.
Meanwhile Daddy sold our family home, which gave him some money for emergencies but very few pleasures. He moved into a nice senior citizens’ complex, designed for independent living, with group meals and activities. He made friends and played cards and was close enough to Mother’s nursing home to pay daily visits. Then, his health began to fail.
For a time there was a very real prospect that both of them would be in nursing homes at the same time. Then, in the spring of 2008, each began a further decline. Mother decided that enough was enough. She told me and my Aunt Rose, “I want to die.” And so she did, by declining food and medication. She ended her days in a palliative care unit in St. Matthews, only a few blocks from where she had lived the happiest days of her life. In retrospect, I think she died of a broken heart.
A month later, her older sister Lucille died at the ripe old age of 91, in her own home surrounded by loved ones. And then, just after July 4, my father joined them, passing from life in the very same corridor as my mother, attended by the same nurses. It was a blessing.
It is too painful for me to imagine what would have happened if Mother had been thrown out of the nursing home for inability to pay. “Tax reform” – Donald Trump-style – might well make that happen. It is despicable legislation, the product of a time when lowering taxes for the rich “trumps” caring for the people who made this country great through hard work and patriotism. I don’t think my father went to fight in World War II to save a nation where the super-rich call the shots.
If this is a “big, beautiful bill” in the eyes of some, to me, it is a cancer in the American soul.
This article was originally published by Kentucky Lantern, a part of States Newsroom.
This post was originally authored and published by Keith Runyon from Missouri Independent via RSS Feed. Join today to get your news feed on Nationwide Report®.
