The Major Elder Law Issue Candidates Are Not Talking About
Paying for long term care is a major crisis for many American elderly people and their families, so why are presidential candidates not mentioning it at all?
For a long time, policy makers have known that the U.S. faces an impending crisis. People are living longer and longer. As a consequence, more and more people are in need of costly long term care, either in a nursing home or with in-home assistance.
Against this backdrop, most people have little ability to pay for those costly services.
That means they have to rely on family members to provide care or turn to the government for assistance.
This would seem to be the perfect issue for a presidential candidate on the campaign trail. It affects millions of Americans across the political spectrum. Since elderly citizens also vote at a higher rate than younger people, addressing elder issues is normally a good way for politicians to court votes.
Despite that, as Next Avenue points out in "Why Candidates Aren't Talking About Long-Term Care," no candidate for president is talking about long term care affordability. This may be intentional.
In fact, those who might be expected to make a political issue out of long term care are choosing not to do so. For example, the AARP prefers to make it an issue at the state level where they believe it can have more of an effect than it can have on a national level. Another reason cited is that long term caregivers themselves are too busy and too tired to advocate for themselves and take the issue directly to candidates.
One thing is certain. If something is not done to address long term care, then the situation will only get worse. If you are concerned about the problem and happen to be at one of the hundreds of campaign events this year, consider asking the candidate about it if possible.
Reference: Next Avenue (Jan. 29, 2016) "Why Candidates Aren't Talking About Long-Term Care"
