[ExI] nursing homes, was RE: NYT: Happiness May Come With Age, Study Says

[spike]

> ...On Behalf Of spike
>...
> ...We could 
> arrange for the sick elderly to have some fun with their last 
> little bit of time... spike

Apologies for the overposting.  My mind is really cranking on this idea.

If we could work out a good tilt-chair hemispherical dome VR with exhaust
pipe arrangement, perhaps with a processed food input mechanism, we might be
able to create such a device for home use.  If we get clever, I can imagine
building something like that in the 30k to 50k range.  That would be high
end for some, but look at it this way: full time assisted living costs in
the 6k to 10k range per month.  So if you look at it that way, we can
imagine a consumer level tilt chair that could be taken home for the cost of
five months of assisted living, and of course would have plenty of resale
value after the patient passes on.

The problem with assisted living is that it requires proles to attend the
elderly constantly, the feeding, the bathing, the other matters that need
proles to attend.  Even minimum wagers cost a lot of money.  And think about
it my extropian friends, how eager are you to be tended in your final
painful months by proles who work for minimum wage and cannot find *any*
other job besides sponge bathing you and changing your soiled diapers?

Do the math please.  You need about one orderly/attendant for each 8 to 10
patients, 10 bucks an hour, 24 hrs per day, 7 days a week, the doctor on
call, the nurse in attendance, the building, the administration costs.
Currently one can get a *really* low end terminal care facility with a
fairly good social security pension plus medicare.  Together they will just
cover it.  But we are almost out of other peoples' money.  Then what?

Plenty of us buy cars that are on the order of 30k to 50k.  If we could
facilitate home elder care, imagine the buttloads of money we could make,
and save others at the same time.

spike