Triple Care Crisis: Child Care, Elder Care, and Health Care

We don't just have a care crisis, we have a triple care crisis. Child Care, Elder Care, and Health Care are expensive, often unaffordable, and many times unavailable. All of them are critical.

We have lots of problems that need to be fixed, but you could group some of the important ones into something I’ll call a Triple Care Crisis: Child Care, Elder Care, and Health Care.

Child Care has always been a problem, and we don’t talk about it enough. Without good, affordable, child care, many families can’t earn enough money to support themselves. That’s an especially big issue for single parent families, but just as impactful in many two-parent families where neither parent earns enough for one parent to stay at home caring for the children. The whole world is facing a demographic cliff as fewer and fewer young people will have to support more and more older people. We need more young people to restore demographic balance, and we need those young people to be able to raise their own children. Making child care work is in everyone’s best interest.

Another crisis is Elder Care. A huge percentage of the country is getting old enough that they need some level of assistance, if not total, round-the-clock, care. We really have no system for that care. We rely on a duct-taped combination of long term care insurance and Medicaid, but mostly hope that family members will be around to do the bulk of the work for free. Those family members might be working age adults or parents, and their ability to provide elder care comes with an impact on their ability to continue to work and provide for their own families and needs.

I started to allude to the Health Care Crisis in my previous post. Health care in the United States is expensive, and our health insurance system has gigantic holes in it. Just one procedure like a knee replacement can cost up to $100,000, and someone with cancer or another serious disease could accumulate $1 million or even more in expenses. Nobody can pay those costs without insurance, and our health insurance system isn’t really up to the task. Making it even worse, our current system expects health insurance to be provided by employers, but sick people may not be able to work. Our system kind of works for people who are mostly well but is bound to fail just when it’s most needed.

None of these have easy, obvious, solutions. Every “obvious” solution brings it’s own set of alternative problems. I’m not in a position to fix any of these, but maybe I can help enlighten a few people, and maybe some good can come of that. Real solutions start with understanding where we are and why we got here.