Family and social burdens come with an aging population and comparatively fewer young workers. There is virtually no legal restriction on the ability of people to acquire long-term care insurance with pretax dollars at work. For people who must buy insurance outside the workplace, however, tax breaks are stingier.            

Because Medicare does not cover most long-term care, seniors must provide for their own needs, or exhaust their assets to qualify for Medicaid.

Because women are more than twice as likely as men to experience a long stint in a nursing home, this is a "women's issue/human rights issue."

Four states allow seniors to protect assets against Medicaid by buying insurance, but Congress has prevented similar arrangements in the other 46 states.

Why can't we have a level playing field?  People who save for retirement, purchase health insurance, long-term care insurance and/or day care should receive just as much tax relief as people who obtain those benefits at work!

And what about portable health and retirement benefits, so that people are not penalized when they switch jobs?

Why can't everyone protect assets by buying long-term care insurance, using Medicaid only for catastrophic costs?

Beyond expressions of sympathy or empathy, what are the respective positions of Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John McCain on these issues?

You tell me…

After Super Tuesday has come and gone, I still don't know where the presidential hopefuls put working women in their hierarchy of targeted constituencies. Women make up 54% of the electorate and make MOST spending decisions for American families and millions of small businesses, yet tax laws, labor laws and a host of other institutions are still designed from top-to-bottom for an Ozzie and Harriet lifestyle. I don't say this to marginalize the life many of our grandparents and parents lived. It's merely a direct observation.

Our major economic institutions reward families with a full-time worker and a stay-at-home spouse, and by comparison punish every other arrangement. The labor market does not provide women with the flexibility we need for the varied lifestyles we live in the 21^st century.

All I'm saying is that our nation's employee benefit system needs to be reformed in order to meet the needs of women today. We all know that women are more likely to work part-time so that they can look after children or elderly family members. So, women are less likely to ever qualify for employer-provided benefits. Women move from job to job and in and out of the labor market more often than men; therefore, women are more likely to be burdened by employee benefit programs that penalize job switching.

Why can't we have flexible employee benefit systems that make it easier for dual-earner couples to obtain higher wages rather than unneeded, duplicate benefits, and for part-time workers to accept lower wages in return for more valuable health and retirement benefits?

Why can't we have flexibility in labor law, making it easier for workers, especially parents with young children and caregivers for elderly parents, to choose alternatives to the traditional 40-hour work week?

Why can't the system be flexible to enough to reflect the ways people actually live today, rather than the way they lived 50 years ago?

Why can't we have a system in which ALL benefits programs are "portable" — following the worker wherever she goes in the modern, dynamic market?

Have the "big four" presidential candidates – Hillary, Obama, John, and Mike – even talked about such things?

Why can't they?

 You tell me…