The Need to Plan for the End

Recently, a friend sent to me an article from the Wall Street Journal dated February 25, 2012.  The title of the article was “Why Doctors Die Differently.” Although not specifically mentioned in the article, most of the Medicare spending for a person occurs in the last months before their death.  Usually, that spending outweighs all previous Medicare spending on that person. In the article,...

Changes in Medicaid

As I write this blog, I am waiting on a telephone conference with the Secretary of the Kansas Department of Health regarding the proposed Medicaid changes. It will be interesting to see what the Kansas officials are being required to do. Proposing a change and then implementing that change are two entirely different things. Implementing a change and it passing the muster of both federal and state...

A Life Worth Living is a Life Worth Remembering, Part 2

In my last blog, I talked about The Grandparents Book and how important it is to capture the memories of our grandparents and our parents.  That holds true for us.  The saying, “A life worth living is a life worth remembering,” really drives home the point that we need to appreciate our lives. I will admit that I am a little bit of a journal junky.  I have started and stopped many a...

A Life is Worth Remembering

In the early 1980′s, my wife and I found a book called The Grandparents Book. It is a book to be given to grandparents for the grandparents to write down their memories of their life at various stages. Some of it is funny, but some of it is historical. It starts off with where the grandparents were born, where all they went to school, what types of games they played at various ages in their...

We are the Rural and Frontier

As I write this blog, I just got off a telephone conference regarding the proposed changes to our Kansas Medicaid rules.  What struck me was when the speaker referred to our area as the rural and frontier area.  I guess they think that we are still using the horse and buggy. Medicaid has long had Home and Community Based Services, which is a program that provides services in the home, versus...