Many who left the workforce to care for relatives need support

Taking care of ill and aging loved ones can be a physically and emotionally intensive sacrifice. It’s often gladly given, but it’s just as often financially brutal.

Many adults taking care of ill or aging loved ones must rely on savings or limited pensions or retirement accounts to cover both themselves and their charges for months or years, sometimes with no end in sight. Often they must spend more money than they have coming in. Many face eventual bankruptcy — and the loss of their ability to care for their loved one.

Nationally, 48 million people provided care for a loved one with health or functional needs in 2020. Over the course of the pandemic, four times as many people dropped out of the workforce to care for a spouse, sibling, parent or grandparent as opposed to a child, says the Federal Reserve’s latest Monetary Policy report.

This doesn’t only affect the families. As labor market cruises toward pre-pandemic levels of employment, the top two factors keeping adults out of the workforce are early retirement and caregiving, according to a Federal Reserve report. This represents an enormous number of productive adults lost to the workforce.

President Joe Biden last year pushed to include funding in his infrastructure package to employ additional home care workers as well as expand Medicaid options for families. The $400 million package was cut out of the bill that wound up passing in December.

In Pennsylvania, the Caregiver Support Program provides support to home caregivers, but its reach is too limited. The income cutoffs are extremely low. To receive full reimbursement, household income cannot be higherthan 200% of the federal poverty line, currently set at only $18,310 for a family of two. The program reimburses caregivers for supplies but not for the income they’ve lost in caregiving.

Now is the time to provide more relief for those providing care. Such relief could take the form of direct payments, subsidizing the cost of a home health care worker for low-income families or encouraging employers to allow flexibility.

Some of this support must come from the federal government, but the commonwealth could do better. The state could have appropriated some of its relief aid to help defray costs for families who left the labor market to take care of a loved one. Within the present system alone, it could raise the income limits for receiving reimbursements from public funding and raise the amount given to caregivers.

In some other states, like New Jersey, Medicaid already allows spouses to be paid for care work. The government should quickly expand this programto Pennsylvania.

Nursing homes and home care workers remain understaffed, and many aging citizens prefer to remain with family anyway. America’s aging population is growing rapidly, and neither those in need of care nor their caretakers should fall through the cracks.