Shah: Washington keeps failing America’s caregivers

Washington has a caregiving complication And I don t mean the million Americans in predicament providing unpaid care to aging relatives I mean Washington s chronic inability to do anything about it Multiple caregiving bills sit in committee purgatory languishing for years The RAISE Family Helpers Act was passed in establishing a national strategy to patronage family assistants but it did not provide funding The Credit for Caring Act providing a modest tax credit for caregiving expenses has been reintroduced session after session with no movement The lifespan respite care operation receives million annually enough to serve of family support workers Meanwhile the caregiving predicament has exploded nationwide AARP s overview shows that caregiving surged by million people in a decade representing a increase The average weekly caregiving time has tripled since from nine to hours By older adults are expected to outnumber children for the first time in U S history And what has Washington s response been Thoughts prayers and National Family Care providers Month I ve watched this failure from multiple vantage points As someone who cared for my wife through cancer after caring for my grandfather through dementia I know the impossible math of caregiving As founder of CareYaya one of America s largest caregiving platforms and a researcher leading NIH-funded studies on caregiver training I see how federal protocol failures cascade into chaos for families The political dysfunction is bipartisan and equally maddening Republicans block any meaningful venture in respite care training programs or workforce advancement Democrats propose expansive programs such as universal paid leave that aren t budget-conscious and often go nowhere Both parties miss what s sitting right in front of them Former Surgeon General Vivek Murthy got it right in his advisory which positioned caregiver burnout as a national general vitality crisis When helpers are depressed or fatigued there s a increase in crisis room use and nearly in additional medicinal costs per case We re hemorrhaging billions in preventable healthcare spending because we refuse to invest in caregiver encouragement The approach isn t more cabinet programs It s recognizing an existing care workforce and treating them like professionals Research shows that more than of family care providers are interested in training to work professionally caring for patients in other households We can create a workforce enhancement pathway for millions of Americans who already do this work want professional credentials and could fill America s healthcare workforce shortage It s the infrastructure bill model applied to human infrastructure create federal funding for caregiver training and credentialing partner with locality colleges for certification programs provide professional pathways and let Medicare and Medicaid reimburse for trained family support workers The economic event is overwhelming We spend trillion annually on healthcare but family helpers provide billion in unpaid care We re running a healthcare system that depends on extracting free labor from families until they collapse The political development should be equally obvious Caregiving is a rare issue with an actual bipartisan constituency red states and blue states are similarly affected So why does nothing happen Because caregiving falls between every committee s jurisdiction It s robustness framework but also labor framework family plan and aging agenda It s everyone s predicament and no one s priority Meanwhile the demographic wave approaches By the caregiver help ratio of middle-age people in society to help every older adult drops from to just The system that s already failing will face impossible demands During National Family Support workers Month November both parties will issue statements celebrating care providers sacrifices host events and use the word hero a lot Then they ll return to D C and do exactly nothing Here s a radically different idea instead of celebrating supporters sacrifices let s reconsider the expectations placed on them Fund training programs Create professional pathways Recognize care work as real work The legislative conveyance doesn t matter reconciliation stand-alone bills whatever However the window is closing In when older adults outnumber children for the first time Washington will have two choices point to a caregiving workforce we invested in and professionalized or point fingers at each other while families drown Right now we re on track for the latter And million Americans are paying the price for our dysfunction Neal K Shah is a healthcare researcher specializing in workforce innovation and AI-enabled caregiver training InsideSources