The Strange Political Silence on Elder Care
The Strange Political Silence On Elder Care –Washington Monthly
“Millions of middle-aged women struggle to care for ailing older relatives, and the crisis is only getting worse. So why is no one talking about it? Alexis Baden-Mayer, a freckled forty-five-year-old, put her house on Airbnb three years ago and moved with her husband and two kids into her parents’ home in Alexandria, Virginia. Her mom, who has Alzheimer’s disease, was no longer able to take care of her dad, who had suffered from heart failure. ‘I didn’t really have a good idea of what I was getting into, quite honestly,’ she said, reflecting on what a truly frank conversation with her husband would have sounded like: ‘What do you think of living with my parents for about ten years while their health declines and they die?’….Baden-Mayer is one of about thirty-four million Americans providing unpaid care to an older adult, often a family member. Most of these caregivers are middle-aged, and most are women. They are individually bearing most of the burden of one of America’s most pressing societal challenges: how to care for a population of frail elders that is ballooning in size….Most people assume that Medicare will cover the type of long-term personal care older people often need; it does not. Neither does standard private health insurance…So the safety net you thought would catch you in old age is less like a net and more like a staircase you get pushed down, bumping along until you’ve impoverished yourself enough to hit Medicaid at the bottom….Meanwhile, the cost of hiring a home health aide to take care of a frail parent can add up to $50,000 or more per year….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. You could be a news junkie, following the 2020 race closely, and 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?….One lawmaker who feels strongly about an issue could be worth twenty who merely support it…..’You can divide the world of politicians into two groups,’ said 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.'”
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