Tacoma News Tribune Editorial Board

April 3, 2019

The following editorial originally appeared in The News Tribune of Tacoma, Wash.

Despite incontrovertible evidence that there’s no escaping it, growing old is a force that most Americans tend to live in denial of. A clear sign of this willful blindness is that roughly 90 percent of adults are financially unprepared for the long-term care they’ll probably need someday.

According to the National Institutes of Health, 70 percent of people over age 65 will need long-term support at some point, whether at home or in a care facility. Combine that with the “Gray Tsunami” of Baby Boomers making landfall, the Trump administration continuing to threaten Medicaid cuts and the destabilization of the private long-term care insurance market over the last two decades.

That’s a recipe for disaster as our country ages not so gracefully.