This responsibility comes at a time when more women are working outside the home than ever before. The average caregiver in the United States today is a forty-six year old woman who works outside the home and spends eighteen hours a week caring for her seventy-seven-year-old mother.
Women also have more at stake financially when it comes to long term care. Long-term care is the major catastrophic health care expense faced by older Americans. I have heard from many constituents who mistakenly believe that either Medicare or their regular health insurance policy will cover the costs of long-term care should they develop a chronic illness or a cognitive impairment such as Alzheimer''s disease. Unfortunately, far too late, far too many Americans are discovering that this is not the case. Because statistics have demonstrated that women can expect to live as many as seven years longer than their male counterparts, this fact puts them at far greater risk of needing long-term care than the other half of the population. It is therefore particularly troubling that women, while being at greater risk of needing long-term care than men, are usually far less prepared for the financial consequences. In a recent poll of baby boomers thirty-three percent of the women surveyed reported having less than $25,000 in their retirement accounts. This amount would not be sufficient to cover even one year of nursing home costs.
To help address this problem, I have joined with Senator Barbara Mikulski of Maryland in calling for a doubling of funding for the National Family Caregiver Support Program authorized by the Older Americans Act. I have also joined with Senators Chuck Grassley (R-IA) and John Breaux (D-LA) in sponsoring the Long-Term Care and Retirement Security Act. This important bill would give a tax credit for long-term care expenses of up to $3,000 to help those families already struggling to provide long-term care to a loved one. It would also encourage more Americans to plan for their long-term care needs by providing a tax deduction to help them purchase private long-term care insurance. In addition to encouraging my colleagues to act swiftly on legislation that expands access to long-term care, I also reminded them that there is still more work to be done in order to preserve the home health care benefit for Medicare beneficiaries. Home health care is a less-expensive alternative to long term care, often preferred by seniors because it allows them to receive nursing care in their own home. The kinds of highly skilled services that our nation''s home health nurses provide have enabled millions of our most frail and vulnerable elderly and disabled citizens to avoid hospitals and nursing homes and stay just where they want to be -- in the comfort, security, and privacy of their own homes, enjoying some degree of independence.
Unfortunately, cutbacks in home health care spending have jeopardized care for some of our seniors. Home health spending dropped to $9.2 billion in 2000, just about half the 1997 amount. Those cuts have been particularly devastating in Maine where the number of Medicare home health patients dropped by 23 percent in two years'' time. This means that more than 11,000 Maine seniors are no longer receiving home health services. I have worked hard to restore funding during the past two years, which has helped to ease the crisis. But looming on the horizon is a further 15-percent reduction in home health spending to take effect in October. Last year, I won passage of an amendment to the 2002 budget to repeal the upcoming 15-percent reduction, thus restoring an estimated $13.7 billion to this vital program over the next ten years. The attacks on our country derailed further consideration of a Medicare bill, but I am determined to remedy this shortfall this year. Because the cost of long-term care threatens the financial well-being of families across our nation, I believe my bipartisan long-term care and home health care initiatives are proposals that Senators and Representatives of every political stripe can support. By encouraging individuals to plan now through the purchase of long-term care insurance and by fully funding home health care, we are giving families the peace of mind that comes with knowing their loved ones will receive the care they need.