Michelle Cottle

It becomes even more complicated.

So it's not a great system, even for people who are financially solid.

Okay, so the short answer is no.

It's hard to get politicians to pay attention to this issue for a variety of reasons.

One of which being, and this sounds really stupid, there's no villain.

Often in politics, it's easy to gin up attention for it

if you've got a bad guy on the other side of this.

There's not one.

And also, like, families feel very ambivalent about, well, I should be handling this myself.

They're my parents.

It's my obligation.

So they don't even think in terms of a social safety net for this.

And then, again, most people don't want to think about it at all until they're in the middle of it.

And then they're so panicked, they don't have time to do anything except deal with, like, the emergency situation.

There are a couple of ways that people in Congress that I know of have thought about dealing with this that are bumping around.

One would be to revive the long-term care insurance market, which, once upon a time, a couple of decades ago, this was a thing.

Like, you buy health insurance or car insurance or home insurance.

You could buy long-term care insurance.

But...

It was set up in a way that wasn't really suited for the long haul.