A couple years back, I wrote a piece talking about people who are providing full-time care to an elderly parent at home. I particularly pointed out this situation in my family through 2015, where my wife no longer could work at her profession, nor leave the house for any length of time (an hour or so every couple weeks) because she was caring full-time for her elderly mother (who passed away in 2015).
I wasn't able to conclude how we could actually address this situation; there was no real Government program to assist her (nor were we looking for one) in providing the best possible care for her mother. No one could handle her mother's case better; in fact, we kept talking about preparing for the next time her mother gets sick and has to go to the hospital.
The last time, a year earlier, was relatively disastrous. A pacemaker install led to a five-week hospital stay, the typical hospital-induced infection, talk of hospice care, and havoc wreaked on the patient's expectation of life. The admitting physician was not part of her internal medicine group or her cardiology group but, being the admitters, they had control of her care. My wife, who had far better understanding of the impact of the slightest change in dose of any of her 88-year-old mother's 15 medications, had to stay 14 hours every day in the room lest someone from a practice that did not know the patient take a guess and change a prescription or try a new drug -- which they did anyway.
The patient was ultimately discharged and, instead of hospice care, went home to her daughter's full-time care. As a result, she had a good quality of life, and her daughter had no freedom. Groovy, ain't it? Her medications were managed to the microgram, and the doctors from her actual internal medicine and cardiology practices comfortably relied on her daughter, practically as a medical peer, able to do certain tests and tweak dosages accordingly.
The next time her mother went to the hospital, as we were discussing, my wife brought weeks of hospital processes experience and many months of direct care; though that could have been all for naught if the wrong practice happened to do the admitting. But that's a separate case.
The "case" in point is that while all this was going on, an otherwise productive member of society, with a skill set in demand in her profession, is home, incapable of working -- while she is saving her mother's life. The Government got zero taxes from her because she couldn't work, but saved huge Medicare costs because of the detailed, expert care she was providing for free, the lack of which would lead to far more costly medical care at Government expense.
So here's at least something. My wife is barred from making tax-deferred contributions to an IRA because she is not employed and has no "earned income." Ironically, by not being employed but helping avoid an expensive hospitalization, she saved the government a great deal in reimbursable medical costs. Would it not be at least something if she -- and other home caregivers, many of whom are over 50 or even 60 with working spouses -- were exempted from the earned-income requirement, and were provided a high contribution ceiling for a tax-deferred account, so that the income tax expense is deferred until years later at presumably lower rates? It would be something, essentially making her efforts on behalf of her mother treated as the labor of love that it is.
And since the tax would eventually get paid, it doesn't really cost the Government all that much, certainly not nearly what the Government saves by their sacrifice. Give it a thought.
Care a little.
Copyright 2017, 2015 by Robert Sutton
