Health Care

A University of Rhode Island pharmacy student has just completed an unusual experiment. Twenty-four year old Emily Anastasia spent a week living in a retirement center, South Bay Retirement Living in South Kingstown,  where her roommate was a 92 year old woman.

Governor Lincoln Chafee has released a new report on Medicaid fraud. Lawmakers and citizen groups had been pressuring Chafee to make the report public.

And, after declining for fear of jeopardizing fraud investigations, Chafee finally released the report, along with several proposed anti-fraud bills and a timeline of his administration’s efforts over the past few years to crack down on corruption.  

These are the average costs, over time, of some long-term care options in Rhode Island.

Note that the assisted living figure is monthly ($3528 in 2012), the nursing home rate is daily ($265 in 2012), and the home health aide figure is hourly ($24 in 2012).  That means that if you or a loved one needed 365 days of nursing home care, for example, the cost would be about $97,000 for the year. If you needed about 20 hours of help a week from a home health aide every day of the year, that would work out to about $25,000.

Will we have enough geriatric specialists to take care of Rhode Island's aging population?

In less than 20 years, a quarter of the state’s population will be older than 60. In a series we call “The Silver Boom: Aging in Rhode Island,” we’re looking this week at how the state will take care of this expanding older population, and how the state benefits from these older residents.