Trapped in America's Safety Net

I would need to pay for personal care assistants out of pocket both before and after the age of 65. Twelve hours of care per day, at $ 20 per hour, would total $ 87,600 per year. Even at $ 12 per hour—the lowest rate I could find in Massachusetts—the annual bill would come to $ 52,560. And the bill could be much higher: a bioethics professor in New York whose husband is paralyzed from the shoulders down spends nearly $ 250,000 per year for his twenty-four-hour-per-day personal care.