Personal Finance
Many people can’t afford long-term care. How a federal program may help
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As a historic wave of baby boomers reaches retirement age, finding affordable long-term care is a challenge.
“We’re going to have a major storm coming in our country with all these folks that can’t take care of themselves,” Rep. Tom Suozzi, D-New York, said Thursday at the Employee Benefit Research Institute policy forum in Washington, D.C.
When Suozzi was growing up, all four of his grandparents lived with his family, who took care of them.
That experience inspired Suozzi’s parents to buy long-term care insurance. Both of his parents lived into their 90s and were able to stay at home, thanks to those policies, he said.
Now, that same insurance coverage is out of reach for many Americans.
“People can’t afford long-term care insurance anymore,” Suozzi said. “The insurance companies, when they made a bet on this the first time around, they lost a lot of money because they didn’t take into account that a lot of people live much longer than their actuarial tables.”
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Meanwhile, nursing homes and Medicaid are not equipped to handle the issue, he said.
To address that, Suozzi said he plans to reintroduce a bill called the Well-Being Insurance for Seniors to be at Home, or WISH, Act. The proposal calls for the federal government to create a fund for catastrophic long-term care to help older Americans age at home.
Suozzi last introduced the bill in 2021. That version of the proposal called for long-term care benefits to be available to individuals who have reached retirement age and who are disabled, have severe cognitive impairment or who are unable to perform at least two activities of daily living.
Like Social Security and Medicare, Americans would also need to contribute to the program through a payroll tax to receive the benefits.
The amount of benefits received would be around $3,600 to $4,000 per month, Suozzi said on Thursday. Per the 2021 proposal, that is based on the median cost paid personal assistance for six hours per day.
Waiting periods for care would be based on income, with longer delays for coverage for higher income individuals.
A ‘tough sell’ to raise taxes
Admittedly, the proposal could face hurdles to gaining support.
“The challenge is nobody wants to raise taxes for anything,” Suozzi said on Thursday.
It is a “tough sell” to tell people that there’s a mandatory tax for long-term care, particularly since not everyone will need those benefits, Ben Veghte, director of the WA Cares Fund, said Thursday during a separate long-term care discussion at the EBRI conference.
The WA Cares Fund is a public long-term care insurance program provided to workers in the state of Washington. It is funded by a 0.58% tax on employee’s gross wages.
An estimated 7 in 10 people will need long-term care in their lifetimes, according to Veghte. But that often prompts people to wonder about the other 3 in 10, and why those people have to pay taxes for benefits they may never receive.
In the next decade, at least two or three states will attempt to create long-term care programs like Washington’s, Veghte said. Among the states exploring the idea include California, New York, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania and Minnesota, he said.
Once that happens, the private insurance industry will likely start to offer supplemental products, Veghte said.
“It’s going to take all of us to address the costs associated with long term care and the crisis ahead of us,” Veghte said. “It’s private industry, it’s government, it’s employers, it’s family caregivers, because we know the cost is more than just financial.”
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Nearly 2 million federal student loan borrowers who’ve requested to be in an affordable repayment plan are stuck in a backlog of applications, waiting to be approved or denied, according to new data recently shared by the U.S. Department of Education.
The Education Department disclosed the information in a May 15 court filing in response to a legal challenge lodged by the American Federation of Teachers. The teachers’ union sued the Trump administration in March for shutting down access to income-driven repayment plan applications on the Education Department’s website.
IDR plans cap borrowers’ monthly bills at a share of their discretionary income with the aim of making their payments manageable.
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In late March, the Trump administration made the online applications available again, and said that it pulled the forms because it needed to make sure all repayment plans complied with a court order that blocked the Biden administration’s new IDR plan, known as SAVE, or the Saving on a Valuable Education plan.
Trump officials argued that the ruling had broader implications for other IDR plans, and it ended up removing the loan forgiveness component under some of the options.
The backlog complicates things for borrowers as the Trump administration restarts collection activity. The Education Department estimates that nearly 10 million people could be in default on their student loans within months.
Without access to an affordable repayment plan, student loan borrowers can be suspended on their timeline to loan forgiveness and at risk of falling behind and facing collection activity.
‘The opposite of government efficiency’
In the May court document, the Education Department disclosed that more than 1.98 million IDR applications remained pending as of the end of April. Only roughly 79,000 requests had been approved or denied during that month.
Consumer advocates slammed the findings.
“This filing confirms what borrowers have known for months: Their applications for loan relief have effectively been going into a void,” said Winston Berkman-Breen, legal director at the Student Borrower Protection Center.
The Center said that if the Education Department continued to move at its current rate, it would take more than two years to process the existing applications.
AFT President Randi Weingarten called the backlog “outrageous and unacceptable.”
“This is the opposite of government efficiency,” Weingarten said. “Millions of borrowers are being denied their legal right to an affordable repayment option.”
What’s behind the backlog
A spokesperson for the Education Dept. blamed the backlog on the Biden administration, saying that it “failed to process income-driven repayment applications for borrowers, artificially masking rising delinquency and default rates and promising illegal student loan forgiveness to win points with voters.”
“The Trump Administration is actively working with federal student loan servicers and hopes to clear the Biden backlog over the next few months,” they said.
The Biden administration put the student loan borrowers who’d enrolled in its new IDR plan, SAVE, into an interest-free forbearance while the GOP-led legal challenges to the program unfolded. Many of the currently pending IDR requests are likely from borrowers who are trying to leave that blocked plan to get into an available one.
Sarah Sattlemeyer, a project director at New America and senior advisor under the Biden administration, said that the current backlog began last year “and has existed across both the Biden and Trump administrations” as a result of the legal battle over the SAVE plan.
“It is a demonstration of how complicated the loan system is, how much uncertainty there has been over the last few years and what is at stake,” Sattlemeyer said. “There also isn’t clarity around how some applications in the backlog should or will be handled, such as those where a borrower chose an option that no longer exists on the application.”
In recent months, the Trump administration has terminated around half of the Education Department’s staff, including many of the people who helped assist borrowers.
That is also likely one reason why so many of the applications haven’t been processed, said higher education expert Mark Kantrowitz.
“Perhaps the reduction in staff is affecting their ability to process the forms,” Kantrowitz said.
The Trump administration’s resumption of collection efforts on defaulted federal student loans has far-reaching consequences for delinquent borrowers.
For starters, borrowers who are in default may have wages, tax returns and Social Security payments garnished.
But involuntary collections could also have a “spillover effect,” which puts consumers at risk of falling behind on other debt repayments, according to a recent report from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York,
As collection activity restarts, disposable income falls
“We were obviously somewhat concerned about potential spillovers to delinquencies on other types of debt,” the New York Fed researchers said on a press call earlier this month.
“During the period where people were not required to make payments on their student loans, they could have used that money to pay their credit card bills and auto loans,” the researchers said. “Now they have to make these payments again on their student loans, so that could put pressure on their ability to pay these other loans.”
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The U.S. Department of Education’s crack down on student loan repayments could take billions of dollars out of consumers’ pockets, reports show. Monthly collections on defaulted loans may reduce disposable personal income between $3.1 billion to $8.5 billion a month, according to research by JPMorgan.
“Part of the reason that some people are adding to credit card debt is because they have student loan payments — that’s the spillover effect,” said Ted Rossman, senior industry analyst at Bankrate. “Something’s got to give.”
‘It’s just money that can’t go to other financial things’
Until earlier this month, the Department of Education had not collected on defaulted student loans since March 2020. After the Covid pandemic-era pause on federal student loan payments expired in September 2023, the Biden administration offered borrowers another year in which they would be shielded from the impacts of missed payments. That on-ramp officially ended on Sept. 30, 2024, and the Education Department restarted collection efforts on defaulted student loans on May 5.
Whether borrowers face garnishment, or opt to resume payments to get current on their loan, that’s likely to have a significant impact on their wallet.
“It’s just money that can’t go to other financial things,” said Matt Schulz, chief credit analyst at LendingTree.
After the five-year pause ended and collections are resumed, the delinquency rate for student loan balances spiked, the New York Fed found. Nearly 8% of total student debt was reported as 90 days past due in the first quarter of 2025, compared to less than 1% in the previous quarter.
Currently, around 42 million Americans hold federal student loans and roughly 5.3 million borrowers are in default, according to the Education Department. Another 4 million borrowers are in “late-stage delinquency,” or over 90 days past due on payments.
Among borrowers who are now required to make payments — not including those who are in deferment or forbearance or are currently enrolled in school — nearly one in four student loan borrowers are behind in their payments, the New York Fed found.
As borrowers transition out of forbearance and into repayment, those borrowers may also face challenges making payments, according to a separate research note by Bank of America. “This transition will likely drive delinquencies and defaults on student loans higher and could have further knock-on effects for consumer finance companies,” Bank of America analyst Mihir Bhatia wrote to clients on May 15.
In a blog post, the New York Fed researchers noted that “it is unclear whether these penalties will spill over into payment difficulties in other credit products, but we will continue to monitor this space in the coming months.”
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