Outsourcing care of your parents... to India

A story in the Guardian earlier this summer highlighted the problem faced with families who must hire assistants to care for elderly parents with Alzheimers:

Steve Herzfeld has just spent five years of his life caring for his elderly parents as they succumbed to Parkinson's and Alzheimer's, deteriorated and finally died. But the family's story is extraordinary and even uplifting. Faced with crippling medical costs, Herzfeld took his mother and father from their home in Florida to India and managed to give them such a high level of care in the oceanside city of Puducherry (formerly Pondicherry) that they appeared to regain some quality of life and even dignity...

Putting them in the cheapest acceptable home available would have cost $6,000 (around £3,700) a month, and they did not have that kind of money. More than that, Herzfeld did not want to take this route: he had noticed a marked deterioration in his mother's contentment when she had to spend a few weeks in a home after the fall...

But once staff had been found, he could give his parents a much higher standard of care than would have been possible in the US for his father's income of $2,000 (£1,200) a month. In India that paid for their rent, a team of carers - a cook, a valet for his father, nurses to be with his mother 12 hours a day, six days a week, a physiotherapist and a masseuse - and drugs (costing a fifth of US prices), and also allowed them to put some money away.