Editor, OBSERVER:
The Legislators want the Chautauqua County Home to be sold. Maybe to a nice Lutheran home.
Seriously! Wake up and do your homework. The final reimbursement rule the government decides to impact our defenseless elderly won't make it close, just make it so the average Chautauqua County citizen will be unable to afford the care out there.
Private means a small percentage of Medicaid and Medicare rooms are available, so you will be on a five-year waiting list. Everyone better be prepared to move your aging relatives to your back room that has a television bumping around your house and they can be watching out the window when you come home from work.
That's what no County Home will get us. The Chautauqua County Home is a right we paid for. Let's fight for it. Legislator Larry Barmore called it progress. I think not. The Home was opened 50 years ago. We relocated residents in from the Dewittville Poorhouse. It strived for excellent care and living conditions.
Now we will be caring for our parents at home again; cooking, cleaning and medicating to save our money because if mom doesn't have the funds - $76,000-90,000 a year - we may have no other choice.
And our unchanged tax bill - still one of the highest in the state - will be exempt.
Legislators do your homework. Yes, government funding has been cut from our taxpaying parents and grandparents and we are obediently standing by for it.
The government and insurance companies are now telling medical doctors what care they support. Too bad for you if you don't have $200,000 because you will be on a waiting list.
JULIE HUTCHINSON,
Dunkirk
