Why Is A 108-Year-Old Resorting To GoFundMe To Pay For Home Care?

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- Longtime activist Judith Bernstein of Chatham, Mass. has started a GoFundMe campaign to raise money and help her stay in her home.
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By Ross Barkan, The Guardian, July 7, 2021. - Excerpts, Ed.

- The predicament of Juliet Bernstein is just one more example of how America’s byzantine healthcare system fails so many. -

A 108-year-old woman named Juliet Bernstein recently launched a GoFundMe to pay for around-the-clock home care that she could otherwise not afford. A retired schoolteacher who is physically frail but mentally sharp, Bernstein, who was born before the first world war, hopes to remain in the modest Massachusetts home where she retired, receiving help to cook, clean and bathe. “I saw it was being done for someone whose child was very sick,” Bernstein, a longtime civic activist, told the Boston Globe.

“So I said, ‘I’m not going to go to a nursing home. I’m remaining here.’” Bernstein has raised more than $100,000 so far, an impressive figure that still may be spent down quickly, given the realities of the American healthcare system. Bernstein’s home care is not eligible for Medicare or Medicaid assistance. She cannot afford private insurance for long-term help, living on her modest pension and social security.

While it’s heartwarming that the GoFundMe has been able to raise cash for her home care, her predicament is just one more example of how America’s byzantine patchwork of public and private for-profit healthcare options fail so many people, particularly the elderly and the vulnerable. Even if Bernstein decides to move to a nursing home, Medicare will pay for only a limited stay with such care. Medicaid provides nursing home coverage if a person’s assets do not exceed $2,000, excluding a home, car and personal belongings. Since she has a pension along with social security, Bernstein does not meet that threshold.

She wants to avoid the fate of many seniors who spend down their assets to qualify for long-term care under Medicaid. That would mean bleeding out her savings, selling her home and becoming effectively destitute. To receive mostly free healthcare in America, that is the decision many elderly and ill people must make.. Other advanced democracies already guarantee healthcare to everyone. America is the tragic laggard. Instead of single-payer healthcare or a national health service, we have been forced to endure an expensive, predatory privatized system with a fractured safety net for the elderly and the extremely poor...

More,
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/jul/07/juliet-bernstein-108-year-old-gofundme-home-care-america-healthcare
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Chatham activist Juliet Bernstein, 107, starts GoFundMe to stay in her home, Cape Cod Times, June 16, 2021,
https://www.capecodtimes.com/story/news/2021/06/16/chatham-activist-juliet-bernstein-107-starts-gofundme-stay-home-mercy-otis-warren-council-on-aging/7598918002/

.. Bernstein is a well-known figure in Chatham and on Cape Cod. She served in the League of Women Voters of Lower Cape Cod and in the ’80s was actively involved in the Cape Cod Chapter of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, an international peace group created during World War I.