As life expectancies grow and 75 million baby boomers enter old age, policymakers are sounding the alarm about an imminent crisis in long-term care for the elderly.
Some lawmakers are starting to wonder what they can do to help the millions who take care of their aging family members for free. According to a study by AARP, the care that roughly 40 million Americans deliver to loved ones is worth $470 billion.
"Families have always been the backbone of our system for caring for people," Kathy Greenlee, the assistant secretary for aging at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, told the Wall Street Journal. "Really, if we didn't have them, we couldn't afford as a country to monetize their care and we couldn't replace, frankly, the love they provide to family members."
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It's not just the increasing number of senior citizens that portends a challenge for long-term care. There also aren't enough younger adults to care for the elderly. Generation X, the generation that followed the baby boomers, is significantly smaller.
"The math doesn't add up," U.S. Rep. Michelle Lujan Grisham, D-N.M. told the Journal. Grisham recently introduced legislation aimed at creating an organization of volunteer caregivers, "CareCorps," modeled after AmeriCorps and the PeaceCorps.
Other legislative proposal focus on easing the financial burden on family caregivers. One bill that was recently introduced in Congress would establish $3,000 tax credit for family caregivers. Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders have suggested that family care be treated as work in determining Social Security benefits.
If anything will the country towards a solution, it's the universality of the problem.
Victoria Walker, of the Family Caregiver Platform Project, which is lobbying state political parties to address the issue in their platforms, explains: "Almost every family has this issue either themselves or they know someone close to them that has been touched with this."
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