Health Care For America Now

An editorial in last week’s New York Times called attention to problems in the field of home health care, noting that health paraprofessionals who provide direct care to the elderly and disabled (“direct-care workers”) represent one of the fastest-growing occupations in the country yet remain unprotected by basic labor standards.  As such, the home health field—whose workers the NYT piece describes as among the “lowest paid and most exploitable”—suffers from very low job retention, with annual turnover of 40-60 percent on average.

The challenges that direct-care workers face are familiar to us.  Ninety percent of these workers are women.  Moreover, direct-care workers provide the bulk of the long-term care received by the nation’s elderly and disabled, and women comprise 2/3 of all long-term care consumers.  Women are heavily represented on both the giving and receiving ends of this type of care, and disproportionately feel the negative effects of poor-quality jobs for direct-care workers.

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