I'm Brian Lehrer. This is my daily politics podcast from WNYC Studios. It's Wednesday,

September 29th. Let's focus now on one of the major priorities in President Biden's

jobs plan or reconciliation bill, known these days of the major priorities in President Biden's jobs plan or reconciliation bill, known these

days by so many names, as we talked about last hour, the American Jobs Plan, Build Back

Better, Reconciliation Bill, Human Infrastructure Bill, they're all the same thing.

We're going to talk about the provisions to expand the availability

of home health care to our country's aging population and to offer better wages and

working conditions to the people who do the intense work of caring for the physical and personal

needs of people as they lose the ability to care for themselves. Across the country,

according to stats, I've seen 820,000 seniors who need help, also younger disabled people,

sit on waiting lists for Medicaid's home care program with an average wait time of over three

years. And for the tens of thousands of

people who work as at-home caregivers, they earn wages so low as to be unlivable in many cases.

This was a problem President Biden took Amat earlier this year when he announced his American jobs plan would contain

$400 billion to make home health care cheaper for Americans who need it and raise care workers' wages

at the same time. But so far, in negotiations, Democrats have agreed to less than $190 billion.

That's less than Biden's original proposal by far.

So with me now to talk about what more funding could mean for the home health industry

and to talk about the individuals on both sides of these very intimate relationships

is A. Jen Poo, Executive Director for the National Domestic Workers Alliance.

A. Jen, welcome back to WNYC.

Thanks for coming on today.

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