An Ordinary Mom's Musings

A while ago I posted a rather long post about the state of long-term care for children in the U.S. If you made it all the way through, I commend you. It was long. . .

I want to clarify something about what I wrote in that post. That clarification is that I and other families are not just seeking a handout.

We want to see our system of long-term care for children fixed. That is my goal and the goal of many others with special needs children. Personally, I don’t care if that comes in the way of insurance companies starting to sell long-term care insurance for children. Or making Medicaid available to children in every state who have disabilities. (It currently is not.) Possibly it needs to be something we haven’t even thought of yet.

Then after this need for long-term care insurance for these special kids is met we need to take it one step further. We need to develop facilities that are capable, willing, and able to help us care for our children. At least in the case of my son, they don’t exist yet in the U.S. I’m open to solutions. I don’t think they need to all be government funded mandates. We as people who know how the system has and does fail us daily, need to be part of this solution. We need to come up with new and innovative solutions of how these goals might be accomplished.

One of the comments I read from someone after reading this post that I had written, was along the lines of “They refuse to take and help us care for our children.” These facilities have the trained medical professionals. Instead, they expect us, as the parents, who have no professional medical or behavioral training to keep our kids at home with us. And we do the best we can to deal with the complex medical issues and behaviors our children have. Somehow they are able to turn down helping our children but we are expected to do it all for them without any, or very little training.

We want solutions. We don’t have all the answers, but we could make a running start if we can get people to listen, and help us with a solution for long-term medical care for children.