Dignity, death and America’s crisis in elder care
BY LATE 2014, CHABELA LAWRENCE WASN’T DOING well. She had mostly stopped cooking and cleaning for herself and began, every so often, to get lost on her way home from the neighborhood coffee shop—the one she’d been to a least a hundred times. The following March, the 74-year-old former catering manager was diagnosed with dementia, and it was clear she needed help. But it was then that she ran headlong into one of the most crushing failures of the U.S. health system: there’s no good way to pay for extended long-term care. Medicare doesn’t cover it. Private health plans don’t cover it. And
