Controllers and Noncontrollers: A Typology of Older Americans and their Caregivers’ Approaches to Managing the Private Funding of Long-Term Care

Abstract

Virtually all the parents of the baby boom generation are now elderly, and baby boomers are facing long-term care as a real-life, intensely personal problem. The inadequacies of the American long-term-care system for meeting the needs of anyone—regardless of age, illness, or disability—are widely discussed. Many of these inadequacies relate to the financing of long-term care. In this study, the authors focus on older Americans’ reactions to this issue and, in particular, how life course events and family background affect their ability to privately finance care. Using qualitative data, the authors propose highly focused views of individual responses to the current long-term care system in the United States.