Paid care among older adults with long-term care needs declined in the first year of COVID-19 while families stepped in.

Separate strands of research have documented impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic in nursing homes and among paid and family caregivers, yet there is little evidence connecting changes in the residential decisions of older adults with the provision of paid and family care, limiting our ability to identify potential substitutions and gaps in care. Using the 2020 wave of the Health and Retirement Study linked to county-level COVID-19 mortality rates, we found that, among older adults with long-term care needs, higher county-level mortality rates were associated with a decline in nursing home residence and an increase in co-residence with adult children. These changes were coupled with a decline in the likelihood of receiving paid care and in the number of paid caregivers and an increase in the hours of unpaid care received.

The Changing Demography of Late-Life Family Caregiving: A Research Agenda to Understand Future Care Networks for an Aging U.S. Population.

Repeated claims that a dwindling supply of potential caregivers is creating a crisis in care for the U.S. aging population have not been well-grounded in empirical research.

Caregiving in a Pandemic: COVID-19 and the Well-Being of Family Caregivers 55+ in the United States.

Little is known about the effects of Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) on older family caregivers. Using data from a national sample of 2,485 U.S.

The cyclicality of informal care.

This paper measures the cyclicality of an important input into elderly health: informal care. Using independent survey measures of informal caregiving and care receipt over the past two decades, we find that informal care from adult children to their elderly parents is countercyclical. By contrast, informal care from spouses is procyclical among individuals in their sixties.

Effects of the Affordable Care Act Medicaid Expansion on Subjective Well-Being in the US Adult Population, 2010-2016.

To determine whether the 2014 Affordable Care Act Medicaid expansion affected well-being in the low-income and general adult US populations. We obtained data from adults aged 18 to 64 years in the nationally representative Gallup-Sharecare Well-Being Index from 2010 to 2016 (n = 1 674 953). We used a difference-in-differences analysis to compare access to and difficulty affording health care and subjective well-being outcomes (happiness, sadness, worry, stress, and life satisfaction) before and after Medicaid expansion in states that did and did not expand Medicaid.