Kamala Harris’ proposal to create a Medicare benefit for long-term home care targets an underappreciated part of the economy: caregiving.
The sector is staffed by underpaid and unpaid workers — mostly women — carrying out crucial jobs that will only become more important as the population ages.
Aging adults or those with disabilities who need home care pay for it out of pocket, spending upward of $100,000. That’s a huge expense that drains bank accounts, as Axios’ Maya Goldman and Ivana Saric explain.
Some wind up in nursing homes, a more costly alternative that many don’t necessarily need. Many spend down their assets so they can qualify for Medicaid, which does cover at-home care.
Follow the money: Even as they’re in high demand and the care sector becomes an increasingly large part of the economy, care workers don’t make very much money.
Home health care workers, overwhelmingly women, earn around $16 an hour, on average, per government data — slightly less than what retail sales workers make and roughly the same mean hourly wage as animal caretakers.
And there are millions more people who do this work for no money at all, typically adult children caring for their elderly parents. They are mainly women, too.
Plenty of them wind up putting their careers on hold, stepping out of the workforce, or scaling back at work to do this labor of love.
If Medicare were to provide some kind of universal home-care coverage, something policy experts have recommended — Harris’ plan is based partly on a Brookings paper — that could reshape the way this market works.
It would be hard to expand home health care coverage without making jobs better — increasing wages, providing better benefits, etc.
You don’t just get a bunch of people to shift into these jobs without improving job quality. Without doing that, “it wouldn’t work,” says Aaron Sojourner, a senior researcher at the W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research.
Many policymakers are in the habit of thinking of care as a personal issue rather than an economic concern, says Jocelyn Frye, president of the National Partnership for Women & Families Action Fund, a progressive advocacy group.
But this is something that “actually affects how our economy functions and the economic stability of families.”
A better system would keep more women in the workforce, and raise the economic prospects of those who do this work for a living.
That could even lead to an economic expansion as more unpaid work becomes paid work, and those unpaid workers enter the labor market.
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