Author

Thomas Wiest

CEO, Aspirience Home Care

From my newsletter last week:

Since that day, Ngo has gotten health coverage through the VA. Earlier this month, the VA said it would pick up his leftover bills from the emergency room. The VA has been more generous than the Army all around. It rated Ngo as 100 percent disabled compared with the Army’s 10 percent rating. The VA gives him a monthly disability check, which helps with his finances; his head injury and post-traumatic stress disorder have prevented Ngo from holding on to even a simple job since he returned home. Ngo’s mother, Hong Wyberg, says the Army gives soldiers such as her son low disability ratings to save money. “I don’t fully think they were prepared for the length of time this war is going to last,” Wyberg says. “They had no idea of how many injuries or the type of injuries that were going to come out of this.”

Michael Parker retired from the Army in October, and he thinks Wyberg’s suspicion is correct. “The more I looked into it, I realized that this system does not have the soldier’s back at all,” says Parker. Parker was a lieutenant colonel when he retired last year. Today, he has a disabling condition similar to rheumatoid arthritis. Parker was able to get the Pentagon’s lifelong health coverage for himself and his family; he had been in the military long enough — for at least 20 years. But Parker saw that a lot of other soldiers weren’t as lucky, and it inspired him to become an advocate. “I started posting questions and concerns and opinions on various blogs,” he says, “and it just kind of mushroomed from there.”

Parker started digging through Pentagon data, and the numbers he found shocked him. He learned that the Pentagon is giving fewer veterans disability benefits today than it was before the Iraq war — despite the fact that thousands of soldiers are leaving the military with serious injuries. “It went from 102,000 and change in 2001… and now it’s down to 89,500,” says Parker. “It’s counterintuitive. Why are the number of disability retirees shrinking during wartime?”

Retired Army Lt. Gen. James Terry Scott heads a commission, set up by Congress, to study veterans’ disability benefits. At a Senate hearing last week, Scott said that his commission had compared the way the Pentagon and the VA rated the same soldiers. “The Department of Defense records were matched with VA records on 2.6 million veterans receiving disability compensation,” Scott said. “Those rated zero, 10 or 20 percent [disabled] by the Department of Defense were rated in the 30 to 100 percent range by VA more than half the time.”

In other words, troops often get small disability checks and no military health care when rated by the Pentagon’s disability boards. But when they go to a VA board — with the same injuries — they get much more. Scott said one reason is that the military’s ratings determine whether a person is fit for duty, whereas the VA looks at all conditions that create health problems for a veteran. So the VA ends up rating more disabilities per retired service member. But Scott said another reason may be that the Pentagon wants to keep down its costs. “It is also apparent that the Department of Defense has a strong incentive to rate less than 30 percent, so that only severance pay is awarded,” Scott said.

These numbers yielded some tough questions for Pentagon officials at recent Senate hearings. They conceded that the disability system doesn’t work as well as it should. They admitted it is too bureaucratic and too often adversarial. They said they would listen to suggestions for change. But change in the future will come too late for many soldiers.

It’s important to know, Aspirience Home Care makes home care simple for all.

Author

Thomas Wiest

CEO, Aspirience Home Care

When service members are forced to leave the military by war injuries or illness, they face a complex system for getting health and disability benefits. Sometimes, health care gets cut off when new veterans find they need it most. Some retired soldiers and their families say they are worried that the Pentagon won’t spend enough money to give the injured the care they deserve.

Tim Ngo almost died in a grenade attack in Iraq. He sustained a serious head injury; surgeons had to cut out part of his skull. At Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C., he learned to walk and talk again. He needed personal care assistant at his home as well.

When he got back home to Minnesota, he wore a white plastic helmet to protect the thinned-out patches of his skull. People on the street snickered, so Ngo’s mother took a black marker and wrote on the helmet: U.S. ARMY, BACK FROM IRAQ. On this much, everyone agrees.

But here is the part that is in dispute: The Army says Tim Ngo is only 10 percent disabled.

“I was hoping I would get at least 50 or 60 or 70 percent,” Ngo says. “But they said, ‘Yeah, you’re only going to get 10 percent’… And I was pretty outraged.”

When a service member is retired for medical reasons, the military’s disability rating makes a difference. If Ngo had been rated 30 percent disabled or higher, he would have gotten a monthly disability check instead of a small severance check. He also would have stayed in the military’s health-care system. Instead, Ngo enrolled with the Department of Veterans Affairs. Typically, there’s a waiting period for the VA.

In October, while he was uninsured, Ngo had a seizure, caused by his war injury. He remembers being outside and blacking out; he fell to the ground on the driveway. “My girlfriend was freaking out because she didn’t know what to do,” Ngo says. “She didn’t know if I was going to die because I had hit the wrong side of my head.” An ambulance took Ngo to the nearest emergency room for treatment. It cost him $10,000. Ngo says that today, the bills for the incident are still unresolved.

It’s events like these that make home care such a vital element of one’s recovery process and why we are so vocal about home care support.

It’s important to know, Aspirience Home Care makes home care simple for all.

Author

Thomas Wiest

CEO, Aspirience Home Care

Imagine your mother can no longer live safely at home alone. Of course, you — and she — will want to look at options. What are her care needs? Does she have memory loss? Will she need someone to help her get in and out of bed?

It’s a confusing time that I know many readers won’t have to imagine; I’ve already been down this road with my Mom.

Minnesota seniors’ long-term care options are at risk of drying up. A third of Minnesota’s care centers are at risk of closure, pressured by state-set payment rates that don’t come close to covering the real cost of care.

Research also shows that Minnesota does not have enough resources dedicated to home- and community-based services to meet the demands of an aging population.

Why the shortfall? Like other areas of state funding, long-term care providers suffered negligible or no increases when the state had a budget deficit. Those days are past, and it’s time to get back on track.

It makes absolute sense that the state is sponsoring and moving more and more towards home care needs; it’s more cost effective, it’s better for the morale of all involved because Mom stays in an environment that she recognizes and is comfortable with.

However, a cost-of-living increase for care centers as well as home- and community-based services is essential this year. It will help stabilize the long-term care system, provide money for better pay and benefits for caregivers and make sure Mom has the options she needs wherever she calls home.

It’s important to know, Aspirience Home Care can help you with home care when others cannot.

Author

Thomas Wiest

CEO, Aspirience Home Care

The day is coming when advanced aging will no longer mean leaving home for most Minnesotans. For many, it will lead to the installation of electronic sensors in their homes. High-tech monitors will alert family members or care supervisors when a refrigerator isn’t opened often enough, a bathroom is visited too often, medicine is not consumed or movement is not detected.

Some of what Minnesotans now call nursing homes will be “older adult service centers” that monitor those readouts, offer drop-in care and clinics, host classes and events, and dispatch providers of in-home services. Others will be “life care communities” that offer a variety of residential options for the chronically ill and disabled.

The Legislature should seek to hasten the arrival of that future. When it does, Minnesota’s frail elderly will have more of the independence they want, and their care will be less burdensome to taxpayers. State and federal taxpayers foot the bill for about two-thirds of Minnesota nursing home residents; those tabs are running in the range of $50,000 per year.

The transformation of elder care would be spurred by enactment this session of a bill sponsored by state Rep. Joe Atkins, DFL-Inver Grove Heights, offering income tax credits for installation of electronic “senior sensors.”  Lawmakers should also explore ways to encourage the purchase of long-term care insurance and to allow a Medicaid-eligible senior to use those funds to pay a friend or relative to provide home care.

But until the good day comes when few frail seniors need to leave home for care, the Legislature must also attend to the condition of Minnesota nursing homes. They are hurting: Minnesota has lost 10 percent of its nursing facilities to financial failure since 2000, and one of every four remaining is considered by industry associations at risk of closure.

State underfunding and hyper-regulation are major reasons why. Nursing homes can’t raise rates without state approval. No approval came for 2004-05, and the 2006-07 increase didn’t keep pace with inflation.

Industry representatives are asking the Legislature for catch-up funding for fiscal 2008 and keep-up money for 2009, totaling $64 million. That’s more than three times the increase Gov. Tim Pawlenty’s budget allots for long-term care, and likely more than the DFL-controlled Legislature can muster. But legislators will be derelict in their duty if they turn their backs completely on the facilities’ pleas. What’s more, they’ll do a disservice to tomorrow’s seniors if they spurn the industry’s request for $10 million a year to help underwrite the projects that will turn nursing homes into older adult service centers.

A recent poll of Minnesota baby boomers by Ecumen, the state’s largest non nprofit provider of eldercare, found that they have no desire to end their days in nursing homes. Forward-looking state investments are needed now to make sure they won’t have to.

It’s important to know, Aspirience Home Care can help you with home care when others cannot.

Author

Thomas Wiest

CEO, Aspirience Home Care

PRESS RELEASE – Shakopee, Minnesota, April 2, 2007 – Aspirience Home Care is today proud to announce the launch of the Aspirience Home Care web site www.aspirience.com.

The development of an Aspirience web site for its customers has been a long time in the planning stage. The Aspirience board of directors is committed to ensuring its continuing success and development as a resource and communication conduit for customers, employees and other personal care assistant agencies. The web site will not be a static site and will evolve in response to the requirements and needs of such. Aspirience CEO, Thomas Wiest said ‘I would encourage customers and other home care community resources alike to have a look at the site and feedback their suggestions as to how we can further develop it to meet their needs’.

Our web site provides information about Aspirience the company, our corporate structure, activities, news, partners, newsletters and all available services as well as providing for direct communications channels between the company and the home care community at large.

It’s important to know, instant communication and resources about home care are available at your fingertips at www.aspirience.com.