The US is desperately short of nurses, personal care aides, and other direct care workers who help frail older adults and younger people with disabilities manage their days. Instead of dealing with the problem, policymakers have, predictably, devolved into their usual partisan blame-mongering. Watch, if you can, this recent hearing of the House Energy and Commerce Committee on the worker shortage.
Minimum staffing requirements recently proposed by the federal government never will succeed without a sufficient pool of willing workers. Fundamentally fixing the problem will require more money—lots more—along with immigration reform, increased support for family caregivers, funding for nation-wide training of paid aides, and a top-to-bottom rethinking of the ways we provide care. In the current political environment, little of this will happen any time soon, at least at the federal level.
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