Minnesota legislator working on senior care gap

Senior care is one of the Top 5 legislative priorities for Minnesota’s Republican House majority.

The legislative body will consider a proposal this year to increase the number of senior care workers in the state and create savings programs for families to prepare for long-term needs.

Rep. Joe Shoemacker is authoring the legislation.

“We need to allow people to have options as they grow older,” Schomacker told the Daily Globe. “The goal is to allow individuals to be more responsible for their own long term care costs and services instead of relying on the state to pay for all of those costs.”

To interesting ideas for job seekers:

• Forgive loans for people training to work in nursing homes, and;
• Expand scholarships for recently hired and graduated licensed nurses.

Like nearly all states, Minnesota is facing a future gap in care for its aging population. MinnPost reported in March 2014:

The reality is that there simply aren’t enough younger workers to support an increasingly frail and aging population, let alone taking time off from work to provide hour-by-hour care.

The U.S. Census Bureau expresses the problem as a dependency ratio, or the number of people 65 and older to every 100 people of traditional working ages. The ratio is projected to climb rapidly, from 22 to every 100 workers in 2010 to 35 to every 100 in 2030.