More on the PACE Program

The New Old Age blog did a post today about the PACE program (program of all-inclusive care for the elderly.) Jane Gross discusses the program's history and what it provides, including a visit to one PACE center in the Bronx. According to the National PACE Association, there are 61 PACE programs (this document includes some pre-PACE sites) offered in 29 states as of 2008. To be cared for at a PACE program, an individual 55 or older and eligible under state regulations for nursing home placement. The program is often paid through Medicare or Medicaid.

At the end of her post, Gross brings up a sensitive subject that is receiving comments on the blog:

After a day at the P.A.C.E. center, my only reservation is whether a middle-class person — say, my mother — would have given a program like this a chance or been put off by the race, ethnicity or cultural differences of the other clients. She was by no means a prejudiced woman, but the older she got the more her comfort level depended on being among people of similar background.

I was embarrassed to raise this question. But, P.A.C.E. officials told me, my mother’s resistance would not have been unusual or viewed as a sign of bad character. Shared experience matters at this time of life, and P.A.C.E. centers tend to reflect the neighborhoods where they are located. My mother might have done well at C.C.M.’s Westchester County center, in White Plains, N.Y., or a center in Amityville on Long Island that is soon to open.

Also see this article we posted in September 2008 about a PACE program in North Dakota from The Dickinson Press.