By Michelle Singletary Thursday, July 16, 2009
Fraud is bad enough, but when you have family members or caregivers who are financially abusing their elderly relatives or patients, that's downright despicable.
Financial Abuse Of Senior Citizens Takes Many Forms
And yet, in most of the cases of elder financial abuse, the perpetrators are not strangers. Family, friends, neighbors and caregivers are the culprits in 55 percent of the cases, according to a report, "Broken Trust: Elders, Family, and Finances," released by the MetLife Mature Market Institute. The report was produced in conjunction with the National Committee for the Prevention of Elder Abuse and Virginia Tech.
Law enforcement and securities regulators say the recession is pushing more people to steal from well-off seniors.
"There is definitely more fraud than there has been," said Fred Joseph, Colorado securities commissioner and president of the North American Securities Administrators Association (NASAA). "Elder financial abuse is becoming the crime of the 21st century as the growing senior population is increasingly targeted."
The annual financial loss by victims of elder financial abuse is estimated to be at least $2.6 billion, according to the report. The typical victim of elder abuse is a woman over 75 who lives alone.
It's not surprising that the more health issues seniors have, the more likely they will be victimized. As I searched media reports of abuse for just this year, I found numerous cases where family members and caregivers took advantage of seniors with dementia.
A nursing assistant from the state of Washington was charged with stealing more than $770,000 from the elderly woman she was caring for.
In a Florida case, a man called authorities to report his 80-year-old mother's hairdresser had stolen her checks. The stylist was accused of taking $25,000 from the woman's checking account. But get this: During the investigation, police charged the victim's 52-year-old son -- who first alerted police -- with fraudulently cashing $6,900 in checks from his mentally incompetent mother.
Last month in Virginia, a home health caregiver was sentenced to six months in jail for taking $15,000 from an 85-year-old woman suffering from dementia. The victim was bedridden.
The financial abuse of seniors has become so prevalent that the NASAA and the National Adult Protective Services Association recently united to develop tips and strategies to protect them.
"A silent crime is taking its toll on America -- silent because so many of these cases go unreported," said Kathleen Quinn, executive director of the protective services association. "This announcement is the first step in a partnership we hope will grow to close the gap on elder abuse."
Following are some red-flag warnings the NASAA will be providing to adult protective services workers to help them spot and stop potential elder financial abuse:
This abuse is international!!!
Saturday, 18 July 2009
Care for the elderly - Nothing to write home about
Jul 16th 2009 From The Economist
The government’s new proposals raise more questions than they answer
CARLTON HOUSE in Hatch End, north London, is a small, friendly place. A private care home, it has 22 elderly residents and a well-stocked garden where they sit of an afternoon. Several say that they like Carlton House, and can think of no way to improve it. But they are unhappy that they have had to sell their own homes to meet the bills of this one. Even Andy Burnham, the health secretary, has described care for the elderly in Britain as “a cruel lottery”. State aid for personal care (medical care is free on the National Health Service) is means-tested: those with £23,000 in assets must pay for their own. .
Some end up with bills of £200,000 whereas others receive care free.
About 45,000 people are forced to sell their homes each year to pay for social care. Two-fifths of the roughly 450,000 now in residential-care homes pay their way.
As in other countries, a rapidly ageing population in Britain is pushing the care system towards crisis. Another 1.7m older people in England will require looking after by 2026, the government reckons. This will strain care budgets, which are already heading for a £6 billion annual gap in funding over the same period.
So the government’s long-delayed consultation paper on July 14th was keenly awaited. Two radical options are ruled out: leaving people to pay for their own care and funding it entirely through general-tax revenues (devolved Scotland’s version of the latter is already running out of cash). It outlines three approaches.
The first is a system of co-payments, in which the government would guarantee to everyone a payment equal to a quarter or a third of likely social-care costs, picking up more of the tab for poorer folk. The second is optional insurance, which would let people pay £20,000 to £25,000 to cover themselves against the rest of the cost of their care. The third is a compulsory state-insurance scheme, under which everyone who could afford it would be liable for a lump sum—paid on retirement, say, or from an estate after death—of £17,000 to £20,000 in exchange for the certainty of free care. No serious new government money is forthcoming under any of the options, and state funding would go only towards personal care: the cost of food and lodging in residential homes would fall to individuals who could pay for it.
Just how likely these reforms are remains to be seen. People who already save for their old age worry that they could be forced to cough up an additional £20,000 for care that they may never want. The proposals offer no guarantee that old folk will be able to hang on to their homes. And lump-sum premiums may prove a particularly hard sell: in a Populus poll for Saga, a firm specialising in services to the over-50s, only 6% preferred this option.
Yet some answer must be found to the escalating expense of looking after an increasingly old and frail population. The biggest difficulty with these proposals is that they come years after Labour first declared its interest in the matter, and far too late to be agreed before the next election. Over to the Tories, who have ideas of their own about sharing costs between individuals and the state.
The government’s new proposals raise more questions than they answer
CARLTON HOUSE in Hatch End, north London, is a small, friendly place. A private care home, it has 22 elderly residents and a well-stocked garden where they sit of an afternoon. Several say that they like Carlton House, and can think of no way to improve it. But they are unhappy that they have had to sell their own homes to meet the bills of this one. Even Andy Burnham, the health secretary, has described care for the elderly in Britain as “a cruel lottery”. State aid for personal care (medical care is free on the National Health Service) is means-tested: those with £23,000 in assets must pay for their own. .
Some end up with bills of £200,000 whereas others receive care free.
About 45,000 people are forced to sell their homes each year to pay for social care. Two-fifths of the roughly 450,000 now in residential-care homes pay their way.
As in other countries, a rapidly ageing population in Britain is pushing the care system towards crisis. Another 1.7m older people in England will require looking after by 2026, the government reckons. This will strain care budgets, which are already heading for a £6 billion annual gap in funding over the same period.
So the government’s long-delayed consultation paper on July 14th was keenly awaited. Two radical options are ruled out: leaving people to pay for their own care and funding it entirely through general-tax revenues (devolved Scotland’s version of the latter is already running out of cash). It outlines three approaches.
The first is a system of co-payments, in which the government would guarantee to everyone a payment equal to a quarter or a third of likely social-care costs, picking up more of the tab for poorer folk. The second is optional insurance, which would let people pay £20,000 to £25,000 to cover themselves against the rest of the cost of their care. The third is a compulsory state-insurance scheme, under which everyone who could afford it would be liable for a lump sum—paid on retirement, say, or from an estate after death—of £17,000 to £20,000 in exchange for the certainty of free care. No serious new government money is forthcoming under any of the options, and state funding would go only towards personal care: the cost of food and lodging in residential homes would fall to individuals who could pay for it.
Just how likely these reforms are remains to be seen. People who already save for their old age worry that they could be forced to cough up an additional £20,000 for care that they may never want. The proposals offer no guarantee that old folk will be able to hang on to their homes. And lump-sum premiums may prove a particularly hard sell: in a Populus poll for Saga, a firm specialising in services to the over-50s, only 6% preferred this option.
Yet some answer must be found to the escalating expense of looking after an increasingly old and frail population. The biggest difficulty with these proposals is that they come years after Labour first declared its interest in the matter, and far too late to be agreed before the next election. Over to the Tories, who have ideas of their own about sharing costs between individuals and the state.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)