Quote:
Originally Posted by CliffFletcher
I didn’t know any of this stuff until I started dealing with it recently, but there are two kinds of seniors facilities:
Private assisted living facilities are for people who can’t or don’t want to bother looking after their own home anymore. They might need some health supervision, (medication, minor dementia) but nothing serious. These can be quite nice - they put real resources into furnishings, amenities, meals, and programming (bistros, movie rooms with theatre seating, etc) and cost around 3.5k to 5.5k.
Care homes are for people requiring constant supervision and medical care. The facility might be privately operated, but the care is managed and mostly subsidized by the provincial government as a function of public health care. Staff do their best, but as might be expected these facilities are pretty grim. They cost around 2k, and low-income seniors may be eligible for subsidies that further reduce the cost.
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It is a bit more complicated. Seniors' care in Alberta nursing homes is based on the number of Government-funded beds available. Operators (profit or non-profit) receive the same amount per bed per day from the Government. The number of new beds added to the system is reviewed and approved annually, as is the funding amount, which is quite low (used to be about $80/day a few years ago; not sure what it is now). Cost of being in a nursing home to a person is not free; but it is also not a fixed same amount for everyone. For some it is equal to their CPP+OAS pension income. Some homes charge more.
Privately run care homes can have both funded and unfunded care components. In fact, having government-funded beds improves overall profitability of a home greatly; because they can share expensive services between both resident groups. "Assisted-Living" is just a marketing term invented to de-stigmatize a "nursing home". In AL facility you can have different levels of service starting from "independent" living and all the way to full nursing care. In an Alberta nursing home, the level of service is always the full level of nursing care (which also varies between memory-loss and other specialty units).