Eldercare is now a retention problem, and your best people are the ones leaving

Business Insider reports that Tamara Johnson, 58, held a six-figure executive leadership job, took a temporary leave to care for her husband after a series of catastrophic medical events, and then quit outright this year ^[1][4][5]. That is the shape of the problem for employers: the cost curve in long-term care is now producing resignations from experienced, expensive-to-replace people, not just requests for flexible Fridays.

Johnson's sequence is worth reading as an attrition case study. Her mother was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease and dementia in 2017, and Johnson relocated from New Orleans to Virginia and kept working while providing care ^[2]. Her mother died in 2020 ^[3]. Three years later her husband's health collapsed, and she funded his care through her employer's deferred resignation program and her savings ^[5][6]. She estimates the family spent more than $700,000 across both cases, while her husband's medical disability retirement income was cut to a quarter of its prior level ^[7][8]. "I felt like I didn't have the luxury of falling apart, because if I fell apart, then who would pick up the slack?" she told Business Insider ^[9].

The arithmetic explains why the accommodation stage does not hold. AARP's Alan Weil says caregivers put an average of $7,000 a year of their own money into caregiving resources ^[12]. Johnson's total is roughly one hundred times that annual figure ^[25]. Dozens of families told Business Insider their total eldercare bill for one relative ran into six figures, including one woman who paid $600,000 over five years of assisted living ^[14]. Lana Mountford, 75, entered a one-bedroom assisted living apartment in 2021 at $4,300 a month, about $51,600 a year ^[20][24]. Families are funding this from home equity, relatives, loans, or by leaving work ^[15].

The prices are not reverting. Nursing home costs are up 212 percent since 1997 and adult day services 109 percent, both faster than overall inflation ^[10]. Since 2023, overall prices have risen about 11 percent against roughly 17 percent for care services, a gap of about six points while general inflation cooled ^[11][26]. The input driving it is labor: wages for nursing and residential care workers went from $17 to nearly $27 an hour over a decade, growing 57 percent from 2016 to 2026 against 47 percent across all private wages ^[13]. Higher insurance premiums, transportation, and general service inflation add to it ^[17]. Experts cited by Business Insider attribute the caregiver shortage to a pandemic-era exodus plus a federal immigration crackdown and deportations of healthcare workers ^[18].

Demand is the other blade. Census projections have the US holding more adults 65 and older than children under 18 within a few years ^[19]. CareScout CEO Samir Shah says roughly 70 percent of adults over 65 will need some form of long-term care, and few have planned financially for it ^[16].

What to watch: whether your own exit interviews are coded as "personal reasons" when the cause is a care bill, and whether the leave policies you have actually bridge a multi-year event or just the first ninety days. Watch also for quality substitution, since some families are already moving relatives to lower-rated facilities at half the price of a luxury community ^[21]. Johnson, who carries long-term care insurance herself, says deciding earlier "saves a lot of headaches on the backend" ^[22][23].