[this week author Dan Taylor is our guest blogger; these are some of his past writings]
Wednesday, April 04, 2007
The Parent Care Movement- Something We Need To Begin
What do you get when you combine the War In Iraq, The Gonzales Controversy, a 67,000 Page Internal Revenue Code, and Global Warming?
A Congress that is totally focused on everything but the single largest issue facing the future of the country...how to take care of the parents of 80 million Boomers who are going to live longer, spend more on health care and have less options of where to spend their final days than any other group in history. I am not at all convinced that if every nation on earth adopted the Kyoto Treaty that the one degree decline in temperature over 50 years would affect anything but the fattest furriest polar bear. I am convinced however, that if we don't start thinking about our parents we will be stepping over them in the streets and Depends will become the new growth stock. After all, the election year is only 18 months away and well...we do have sort of 20 years before all the parent stuff becomes sort of sticky.
Let's do this...let's just take control of this issue and resolve it for our parents and for ourselves. Let's start a Parent Care Movement that begins today and ends when the big issues like healthcare, places to live, medical records access, tax incentives, and every other issue facing us as we age are resolved.. Let's just write our Congress people on a state and federal level and tell them if they don't get moving on this we will just not let them have their jobs back. Get your employer, your pastor, your Kiwanis club, your e-mail network all working on this and get them doing it now.
We need care delivery systems that are transparent, efficient, and cost effective. We need more trained caregivers. We need corporations that add caregiving support as a benefit. We need courses on how to let us change our houses to stay in them as we age. We need places for our seniors to connect and communicate. We need aging facilities that look more like places we'd like to live instead of places we're afraid to die in. We need to get churches to hire nurses and caregivers and to build residences for their members to age in. We need technology to connect our shut ins to the world and alarm systems that let them reach out to us when they need us. We need CAREPETS(tm) to be companions to older people whose family and friends have forgotten about them. We need to bring every creative idea, impulse, innovation, and urge that would create a better future for our parents and us....and we need to start NOW!
We need to do anything and everything but wait on Washington to wake up......
Posted by Dan Taylor
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