US. The looming crisis in long-term care
Taking care of the aging population is a crisis in the making, and no one — not families, not government programs and not the health care workforce — is prepared for it.
The big picture: Providing health care to aging Baby Boomers will strain Medicare’s finances, but the problem is even bigger than that.
Long-term care — the kind of services typically performed in a nursing home or by a home health aide — largely falls through the cracks of both public and private health insurance, saddling seniors and their families with financial and emotional burdens they often didn’t anticipate or plan for.
“It’s a problem nobody’s talking about,” said David Grabowski, a health policy professor at Harvard who studies long-term care. “Part of that’s just, these are hard issues to think about. Nobody wants to think about getting old and needing care. But part of it is that these are really hard problems.”
By the numbers: Estimates differ on the specifics, but they generally agree that somewhere between half and two-thirds of seniors will need at least some long-term care.
- Today’s seniors will incur an average of $138,000 in long-term care bills, according to one federal study.
- Even middle-class seniors are largely unable to cover those costs, according to a study published earlier this year, which Grabowski co-wrote.
Read more @Axios
