9-27-2019 Handout Elder Boom Worker Shortage

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and president and chief executive of the SCAN Foundation, which advocates on long -term -care issues. "Left unaddressed, this will be catastrophic. We as a country have not wrapped our heads around what it's going to take to pay for long-term care," Chernof said. Other countries have responded to their aging populations with government -provided care, and many have beefed'up the number of aides and providers. America and England are the only economically developed nations in the West that do not provide a universal long -term -care benefit, said Howard Gleckman, author of a book about long-term care and a senior fellow at the Urban Institute, a nonpartisan think tank. "With climate change, towns get burned down, or people die in fires," which helps focus national attention, Gleckman said. "This is one family at a time suffering in silence." Albert Rose sits on the wharf of.his seafood business and fumes that he cannot find help with his daily work of moving and unloading 50 crates of lobster, each often more than loo pounds. In Harpswell, median age 57, he lives in the oldest town of America's oldest state. Rose, 40, has suffered from two torn rotator cuffs and a herniated disk but continues to perform the heavy labor himself in part because he has for the past five years been unable to find young workers, absent sporadic help from college students during their summer vacations. "Ten years ago, every spring you had young people wanting work on the wharf or want to work on a lobster boat," Rose said. "I haven't seen a single person this spring or summer looking for boatwork." Maine's aging population, and its dearth of young workers, falls particularly hard on poorer businesses and parts of the state that do not have enough resources to compete amid the shortfall. Piscataquis County, a region in the north battered by the closure of its lumber mills, will see the number of people ages 75 to 84 increase by 81 percent from 2015 to 2025, according to the Muskie School of Public Service at the University of Southern Maine. The biggest impact likely is in health care for the elderly.