Following on Jeri’s post about her recent funeral experience, I received yet another in a number of solicitations I began to get when I reached a “certain age”. The page heading is “Funeral Advantage Program Assists Seniors.” It goes on to say how my participation in this program can net my family up to $20,000 tax free. I am supposed to mail the postage-paid card today to see if I qualify.


I don’t have any family to worry about. The funds Edward and I share aren’t in the Bill Gates category, but we will each survive without the other. I am tempted to return the card with a note, “I don’t qualify by reason of sanity.”


Shortly after Ed and I bought our first house in Florida (the first house ever for me), I started to get mailings from local facilities that were supposed to be an enticement to live in a seniors community that would gently lead me from one decrepit stage to the next, no pain. You could, for a huge amount (one particular community was on the river, and beautifully landscaped), live independently as long as you could and when the time came, be moved into the assisted living section, and subsequently to the nursing home, before they come to get you with the shroud.


On a lark, Ed and I stopped in to view this community and what we learned after reading the fine print, was that the “gentle” moving from one stage to the next was not up to you. No, the management would decide when you were better suited to the next stage and should be moved out of your independent living quarters to assisted living and so on.. And that might have something to do with your money running low, and/or they had a really high paying resident coming in who would like your space.


Furthermore, our newly elected (thanks to really stupid people who live here) Republican governor, Rick Scott, fired the chief ombudsman running the watchdog volunteers who inspect senior facilities (nursing homes and Assisted Living Facilities) and respond to complaints by residents and their families, because he dared to ask for a list of the owners. Scott has been seen wining and dining with said owners. There are mom-and-pop facilities out there who try to do a good job, but the ones Scott was worried about were the ones who own many facilities and contributed to his campaign. He is destroying the watchdog program, even as the regulations to monitor the financial community were struck down.


More and more, Florida is not the senior friendly state it boasts of being. The Republicans and dotty knee-jerk seniors who have always been Republican and can’t see how their party has morphed into the evil empire are seeing to that. New York State is far more considerate of its seniors. Except for the weather, it’s a better place to be.

xx, Teal