Most Caregiving is Unpaid Labor
The largest caregiver group in the workforce — 65 million Americans… provide unpaid care for a chronically ill, disabled or aged family member. The value of the services they give free to our society is estimated to be $375 billion a year. That is almost twice as much as the government spends on home care and nursing home services combined ($158 billion).
They give up their savings, sell their homes, often move into the same home with their frail loved ones to cut expenses, and face the constant danger of being fired for their divided concentration between family and work.
Full article on unpaid caregivers.
I doubt anyone in this situation thinks they are giving free services to society.
Interesting. All that free labor will go away once the government takes over.
I agree with Brian. You could probably make a similar argument that most childcare is provided by unpaid caregivers (i.e. parents).
I can almost guarantee that this is the next area for government expansion.
My question is this: Don’t people know that they’re going to get older? Why do we not budget more money to our advanced years? It seems like a bigger deficiency on the part of the elderly than on the part of their caregivers. I know several elderly who did not want to buy a long term care policy because buying it meant they were “getting older.”
The fact that it is such a large problem in society, to me, suggests that 1) people don’t have enough money to save up for old age and 2) people don’t care enough about their loved ones to plan better.
Ms. Sheehy’s article is long on sentimentality and short on realism. She advocates the CLASS Act, part of Obamacare meant to pay for long-term care, as a “solution” to the problem of “unpaid” care. But anyone acquainted with Obamacare knows that CLASS Act premiums go to fund Obamacare, not CLASS itself. In other words, CLASS will have zero assets from which to pay claims – just another unfunded liability foisted upon us by politicians counting on ill-informed experts like Ms. Sheehy to lull us into a sense of entitlement.
People have a moral obligation to take care of their parents to the same degree that their parents took care of them as children. It’s none of the government’s business.