Who Cares for Volunteer Caregivers When They Get Sick?
The American health care system places a heavy burden on informal caregivers. On the Washington Post’s “PostEverything,” Ishani Ganguli, M.D., of Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and Commonwealth Fund President David Blumenthal, M.D., draw on findings from the "Health Care in America" survey from the Commonwealth Fund, Harvard, and the New York Times — and the experience of one of Dr. Ganguli’s caregiver patients — to describe the challenges faced by unpaid caregivers, many of whom face medical problems of their own.
“As internal medicine physicians, we have often seen the effects of caregiver burden — one so well-defined that it has its own medical billing code,” say Ganguli and Blumenthal, who offer clinical and policy solutions to help ease the burden for caregivers.
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