Family Caregiving is a Political Issue

The women's movement had a slogan: The personal is political. That applies to family caregiving as well.

[T]he cost of hiring a home health aide to take care of a frail parent can add up to $50,000 or more a year. So tens of millions of individual women across the United States wind up providing the care themselves for free, and bearing its cost in the form of stress, lost wages, and lost opportunities to nourish their other needs, and their families’....One might expect that a problem that affects so many people so profoundly would become a major political issue. Recent years have seen other issues, including ones that disproportionately affect women in their personal lives, become highly politically salient—from sexual harassment and pay equity to the push for universal pre-K education and improved access to child care. Yet even though American women today are politically organized and running for office in record numbers, elder care remains widely viewed as a purely personal matter. Even a news junkie, following the 2020 race closely, could have heard nothing about it.

Why is that? And could long-term care go from being a sleeper issue to one that boosts a candidate out of the 2020 pack?

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That’s not to say that providing universal long-term-care insurance wouldn’t cause sticker shock when it shows up in government budgets. But the fact is that, one way or another, society is already bearing these costs—mostly in the form of care provided by stressed-out, uncompensated women who have the misfortune of having a family member who needs care and can’t afford to pay for it. What we need is a way to distribute that burden more equitably.

“You can divide the world of politicians into two groups,” says Howard Gleckman, a senior fellow at the Tax Policy Center. “It’s not Democrats and Republicans, it’s people who have been caregivers and people who haven’t.”

The (Possibly) Forthcoming Elder-Care Revolution