Selling the Farm for Long Term Care
Here’s a way of expressing the costs of long term care in the average middle American can really understand:
The mounting cost of long termcare has become a “monster” that is devouring acre after acre of the nation’sprime cropland, pasture, and woodlands. . . It’s a problem that affectsagricultural families in every state, not just the farm belt.
“We’ve translated health-care dollars into acres, [and] theland rural families have spent a lifetime acquiring and cultivating.” Itturns out that the current cost for one month of nursing-home care roughlyequals the selling price of an acre of rural land.
The average rate for a private room in a nursing home is now $70,080 ayear, according to the latest MetLife Market Survey of Nursing Home and HomeCare Costs, released in September, 2004. That’s about $5,840 a month, atypical conservative selling price for many fertile acres in agriculturalareas. The ratio varies from state to state and farm to farm, of course.Here are three examples:
* 441-acre farm, Clay County, Illinois: $1,411,200 ($3,200 per acre)
1.83 -- Acres consumed by one month of long term care
* 165-acre farm, Covington County, Alabama: $1,200,000 ($7,273 per acre)
0.80 -- Acres consumed by one month of long term care
* 135-acre farm, Steuben County, NY: $375,000 ($2,778 per acre)
2.10 -- Acres consumed by one month of long term careLong term care expenses consume even more acres in some areas, especiallywhen the farm or ranch is small. For example, a 97-acre farm in CrawfordCounty, Kansas — up for sale at $145,500 — would be “eaten up” at the rateof 3.89 acres per month! “If you’re not protected by insurance, you’ve got tofigure that for every month you’re laid up, there goes another acre … ormore,” says Truesdell.