Elder villages: ghettos or godsends?

Abstract

In the USA, a country without a universal health care system, access to available and needed services has become less certain during the past two decades and unaffordable for an extended period of illness (Consumer Reports, 1992). The spectre of becoming a medicated welfare statistic in a nursing home has become a reality for many. It is felt by people of all ages and expressed freely among the low and middle income segments of society. A forbidding scenario of post-retirement existence is documented in a 1991 issue of Consumer Reports:

Some Americans pay all [the cost of nursing home or at home health care] with money saved. Others start paying with savings, then turn to Medicaid when they become ‘medical indigents’. Still others use Medicaid from the start, and a few will use a so-called ‘medigap’ insurance policy.

(Consumer Reports, 1991, p. 425, 429)