Outsourcing Your Parents

Here's this story on the latest trend in healthcare outsourcing making the rounds on the WWW. What do you think about it - do answer my poll in the sidebar.

"Some families finding cheaper care for elderly relatives overseas

By LAURIE GOERING - Chicago Tribune

PONDICHERRY, India — After three years of caring for his increasingly frail mother and father in their Florida retirement home, Steve Herzfeld was exhausted and faced with spending his family’s last resources to put the couple in a cheap nursing home.

So he made what he saw as the only sensible decision: He outsourced his parents to India.

Today his 89-year-old mother, Frances, who suffers from advanced Parkinson’s disease, gets daily massages, physical therapy and 24-hour help getting to the bathroom, all for about $15 a day. His father, Ernest, 93, an Alzheimer’s patient, has a full-time personal assistant and a cook who has won him over to a healthy vegetarian diet — so that he longer needs his cholesterol medication.

Best of all, the many drugs the couple require cost less than 20 percent of what they do at home, and salaries for their six-person staff are so cheap that the pair now bank $1,000 a month of their $3,000 Social Security payment.

“I wouldn’t say it’s a solution for everybody, but I consider it the best solution to our problem,” said Herzfeld, 56, a management expert. He made the move to India with his parents, and now, as “care manager rather than the actual worker” has time for things like bike rides to the grocery store and strolls in the botanical gardens with his father.

With the cost of nursing homes, home nurses and medications painfully high in the United States, the elderly and their caregivers have long looked abroad for better solutions. Many families now drive regularly to Mexico or Canada to buy cheaper drugs, or hire recent immigrants to help them look after frail parents.

A growing number of aging couples have bought retirement homes in Mexico, where help is cheap and Medicare-funded health care just a quick drive across the border.

Herzfeld never thought he’d be headed abroad, too. When his mother broke a hip in 2004, he drove down to their home in Pompano Beach from his home in North Carolina, figuring he’d stay a while and help his parents get back on their feet.

But like so many other caregivers, three years later he found himself still on the couch in his parents’ spare bedroom.

Herzfeld began investigating nursing homes, but found that the $6,600-a-month cost at the cheapest one he could find near family members would quickly bankrupt his parents. He also was worried about the quality of life they would have in a nursing home.

So when a friend one day suggested that Herzfeld consider a move to India, “I said right away, ‘There’s an idea!’” he said.

Herzfeld, who is single and a longtime follower of transcendental meditation, had previously spent five years in India. He quickly realized that the graceful town of Pondicherry — a haven for aging hippies from around the world — might just work.

They still are working out some details. India, where life expectancy hovers around 60, lacks physicians who specialize in aging. The family keeps in touch with friends and family by e-mail and videophone, but hasn’t persuaded anyone to visit.

Yet when Herzfeld looks at the bills — less than $2,000 a month for food, rent, utilities, medications, phones and 24-hour staffing — he feels he has done the right thing for his parents and himself.

“It can be done,” he said. “This is working.”"