My name is April Semkins. I'm an office manager at a university in Nashville. Not a native, but my

husband was a Nashville native, so his name was Joe. He was diagnosed in 2013. He was 61 years old.

Joe Semkins was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease, the most common form of dementia. It's a

brain disorder that slowly destroys memory and thinking skills, and eventually the ability to

carry out the simplest tasks. As his disease progressed, it became more difficult for him to just

be at home by himself and there began to be, you know, issues of safety. April did her best to

care for Joe at home at first. We would be out in the car somewhere and he would suddenly not know

who I was and he would be trying to get out of a car and, you know, things like that. After nearly

three years, she realized he needed full-time care. It is a very expensive proposition to care for

someone in a memory care facility. I think during the last year that he was there, we were paying

around $7,300 a month. This is the indicator from planet money, I'm Darian Woods, and I'm Paddy

Hirsch. Thanks to advances in medical science, many Americans are living longer, but increasingly

often our bodies are right lasting our minds. More than seven million Americans now have dementia,

and many of them require the kind of full-time care that Joe Semkins needed in the last years of

his life. The cost of that care is rising to individuals and to the state. We're now at the point

where there's effectively a kind of tax on each and every American to pay for memory care.

On today's show, we'll look at why this has come to pass and what the implications are for the

economy. That's all coming up after the break.

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