“Jill” was overwhelmed. Her husband of forty years, “Mike,” had dementia and was getting worse. He needed someone with him constantly or he became anxious and agitated. He followed Jill from room to room. Jill had aides coming to their home 12 hours a week, but it wasn’t enough. Her caregiver burnout was affecting her physical, emotional, and mental health. Her hair was thinning. She was irritable and exhausted. Jill was ready for Mike to move to a senior living community.

There were two concerns standing in her way. The first centered on the quality of Mike’s social interactions in a memory care community. Mike had always enjoyed hanging out with the guys and was still social and engaged with visitors. In places she’d visited, many of the residents were uncommunicative and most were women.

The second concern centered around finances. Mike and Jill had paid for Long-term Care Insurance (LTCi) for twenty years. Now that it was time to start receiving the benefits, Jill couldn’t even get a claim form from the insurance company. Compounding the problem was the 90-day waiting period between the move into an assisted living community and the start of benefits. She didn’t have the means to private pay for memory care for three months.

We took a three-pronged approach to finding a senior living community that addressed Jill’s concerns.

1. We recommended communities that had both traditional assisted living and memory care “neighborhoods.” We explained to Jill that if Mike wasn’t an elopement risk and was oriented to time and place, the community might assess him for traditional assisted living despite his cognitive decline. Traditional assisted living would manage his medications, cue him for personal care, meals, and activities and vastly increase the likelihood he would have the social opportunities she sought for him.
2. We made sure the communities we recommended had a significant contingent of male residents in their memory care and traditional assisted living neighborhoods that Mike might become friends with.
3. We negotiated with the communities on Jill’s behalf for payment options that would minimize the cost during the 90-day waiting period for Mike’s LTCi benefits.

Then, we used our extensive network of senior resources to find a local LTCi advocate who would wrestle with Jill’s insurance company on her behalf and get Mike the benefits he’d paid for all those years. Jill is getting Mike ready for the move and is looking forward to some well-deserved time to herself.