The Looming Crisis in Long-Term Care

Taking care of the growing senior population is a crisis in the making, declares Axios , and many families, most government programs, and the health care workforce are not adequately prepared for it. The problem is bigger than Medicare's finances being strained by an aging Baby Boomer population. Long-term care largely "falls through the cracks" of both public and private health insurance, saddling many seniors and their families with financial burdens they often have not prepared for. Studies differ on the specifics, but they generally concur that somewhere between 50 percent and 66 percent of seniors will need at least some form of long-term care. While Medicare does not cover most long-term care services, the market for private long-term care insurance remains small and fraught with failure. Consequently, that leaves three options: one, be wealthy enough to pay out of pocket; two, be poor enough to qualify for Medicaid; or, three, depend on family and volunteer caregivers. In many cases, seniors end up doing all three. They start paying out of pocket, then quickly deplete their resources, making them Medicaid-eligible. They then come to rely on family members for at least some additional assistance. There is also the problem of high turnover among nurses and caregivers. And because a large percentage of home care workers are immigrants, the issue is getting increasingly tied up with yet another politically charged debate.