The people who work for advocacy groups representing older Americans and their families are doing happy Snoopy dances this week.
Chip Somodevilla/GettyThe White House budget director Peter R. Orszag testified before a Senate committee on Tuesday.
They have endured a glum period, contemplating the consequences of the special Senate election in Massachusetts and the fate of bills to overhaul health care, which contain several provisions that would benefit family caregivers. But now, here comes President Obama’s proposed 2011 budget for the Administration on Aging, containing something called the Caregiver Initiative. “This is really good news,” said Elinor Ginzler, senior vice president for livable communities at AARP.
Families, every single database or survey shows, remain the backbone of care for old people in this country; it’s an insult, and a demonstrable falsehood, to suggest that contemporary Americans somehow abandon their elders. Most seniors don’t live in any kind of group facility; they’re in their own homes or family members’ homes, being cared for by their relatives with very little assistance from any external source.
If this budget passes, though, there will be a bit more. The Caregiver Initiative provides significant boosts to three existing programs:
- $50 million more for the National Family Caregiver Support Program, which gives grants to the 640 area agencies on aging around the country to provide local families with training, counseling, information and referrals, and respite care. Budgets for this 10-year-old program have stagnated for years while the elderly population and families’ needs burgeoned; this appropriation represents a nearly 25 percent increase.
- $2.5 million more for Lifespan Respite Care program, which doubles its financing. “Respite is critically important to keep people in their caregiving role by giving them a needed break,” Ms. Ginzler said. The program — available to caregivers for disabled family members of any age — pays for brief stays in facilities, or short periods of home care, while family members take a vacation, attend a child’s graduation ceremony or other family event, or just attend to their own lives for a few restorative days.
- An additional $50 million — a nearly 12 percent increase — for the Home and Community Based Services program, which underwrites transportation services, participation in adult day programs and home care, again through local agencies on aging.
One could point out that the total increase of $102.5 million constitutes a tiny, drop-in-the-bucket amount, given the size of the federal budget. One could demur that although AARP analysts estimate that these increases — if they’re actually passed — will assist an additional 200,000 families, AARP’s own recent caregiving study found that 44 million Americans now shoulder the care of relatives over age 50.
One could … but let’s allow some hardworking folks to celebrate; they don’t get that many chances.
“It’s such an affirmation of the importance of family caregiving,” said Suzanne Mintz, president of the National Family Caregivers Association. “When we started the Association 16 years ago, we had to explain to people what we were talking about.”
Now the White House’s Middle Class Task Force, chaired by Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., has asked the caregivers association and other groups to come talk about what families needed to continue to play this vital role. “And they took our advice,” Ms. Mintz said.
“We have to recognize that we’re still swimming upstream,” Ms. Mintz said cautiously.
But $102.5 million more? In the Great Recession?
“We’ve come a long way, baby,” Ms. Mintz said.
