Time Dollars help to activate that experience. Studies have shown repeatedly that community is health-maintaining. Rescigno notes proudly that in the last five years he's had nothing worse than a cold. Families break up. Children move away.
Much disease is borne of loneliness and isolation.
Nursing homes are full of people who could easily be at home if they only had some help with daily functions. The answer of the policy experts was a new kind of social HMO, the SHMO, which would cover certain social services along with conventional medical care. Ensure that a widower gets proper meals when he's released from the hospital, for example, and he might not return so quickly. Invest in prevention and save on cure. Congress authorized a number of experiments with this model, and Elderplan was one.