Who will take care of us when we get old?
These are workers, primarily women, who help older adults and people with disabilities bathe, dress, eat, take their medication, and generally get through a day, either in a nursing home or in someone’s own home.
Key points
- Coordinating care for older adults is a problem that reaches families in every corner of the country, and even comfortable households wonder whether they can secure a dignified life for an aging parent, or, eventually, for themselves.
- Unlike projecting how many jobs AI may eliminate over the next 10 years, or what a country’s birth rate might look like, there’s far less debate among policymakers about how large America’s older population will be in a decade’s time, and how many of them are likely to need direct care for disabilities.
- Depending on which researcher you ask, the US will need somewhere between 625,000 and 1.3 million additional direct care workers over the next decade to keep pace with the growing number of older and disabled Americans — and that’s just to maintain today’s level of care as the population ages, not to fix the shortage that already exists.
To close the gap, policy experts say the United States should bring more immigrants into a sector that’s already about one-third immigrant, while also protecting the roughly 12 percent of current direct care workers who are noncitizens, some of them undocumented.
Additional details
- The question of whether the United States will have enough direct care workers — an umbrella term that refers to home health aides, personal care aides, and nursing assistants — looms large.
- Key takeaways By 2036 the US will need 625,000 to 1.3 million more direct care workers, and policymakers across the aisle agree the demand is real and coming.
- If you’ve talked to anyone currently trying to coordinate long-term care, you probably already know the country is understaffed as it is.
- Three bipartisan-friendly proposals — the Dignity Act, the Careworker Visa Act, and a Brookings caregiving visa — would bring in immigrant caregivers with built-in protections learned from past programs.
- With family caregivers growing in number and nursing homes turning residents away because they can’t find staff, caregiving may be the one corner of immigration policy Congress is actually willing to fix.
How this summary was made: extractive summary — built from the sources' own reporting. It is drawn only from the reporting of the sources listed below — read the originals for full detail. How we summarize →
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