There are about 800,000 people, elderly and disabled, who qualify for subsidized home care on waiting lists to get that care. Some will end up in nursing homes, where they don’t need to be and where the threat of COVID-19 lingers indefinitely. President Joe Biden and the majority of congressional Democrats want to fix that. They originally proposed $400 billion over the next 10 years to provide home and community-based health services. That’s since been whittled down to $150 billion, one indication that it’s a huge sector of society that just doesn’t have the power of, say, a defense contractor to fight for itself. “We Don’t Fix This Because We Just Don’t Care About Old People,” Joanne Kenen, Commonwealth Fund journalist-in-residence at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, writes in a op-ed for Politico. As a society, we don’t care about old people. It’s not just old people, but also disabled people. People who aren’t infants who need help feeding, bathing, and clothing themselves don’t have value in this society. The ancillary point is that those who provide that care, whether they’re family members or paid caregivers, don’t matter either. Read more