Thread by @ddayen

This is it! All this week, we will be running our special issue at @theprospect on family care: the current crisis and how we can fix it with a universal social insurance system. All of the stories can be found at prospect.org/familycare.
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Why do this now, two weeks before the election? Why during one of the busiest news periods in history are we devoting ourselves to covering the topic of family care? Because it intersects with everything that's been happening in 2020.

Family care—early childhood care and education, paid family and medical leave, & long-term care for the elderly and people with disabilities—has been in crisis in the U.S. for a long time. But the pandemic has brought it to a head, as Tasmiha Khan writes: prospect.org/familycare/how…

The basic ability to head to a job and know your children are taken care of has been ripped away. Sick leave, needed now more than ever, is not available. Eldercare facilities are some of deadliest places to be right now.

Also predating the pandemic is the emergence of family care as a political issue, and care voters as a political force. Organizing, as @Marcia_Brown9 writes, has earned hard-fought victories:
prospect.org/familycare/car…

And of course, the burdens of family care, as family members, as workers, and as small business providers, falls most heavily on women, and in particular women of color. Bryce Covert looks at a sliver of this, through the eyes of childcare providers: prospect.org/familycare/run…

The model of family care as something families must figure out on their own has failed completely. The work is so important that it makes other jobs possible, but so undervalued that workers barely survive. Janelle Jones has an amazing piece on that: prospect.org/familycare/the…

In the middle of an election, amid a pandemic and calls for racial justice, the need for a universal family care system has never been greater. I explain more in our introduction to the series: prospect.org/familycare/why…

We've been here before. We have spent decades coming tantalizingly close to achieving some form of support for elements of family care. GW professor Kimberly Morgan goes through that: prospect.org/familycare/mis…

But we've never put the entire system together, as a coherent unit. We've never rolled up child care, paid leave, and long-term care into a single system, meant to handle every stage of family life. That's what we're proposing.

With the help of the amazing @aijenpoo & the National Domestic Workers Alliance, we're highlighting the idea of universal family care: a single social insurance program to cover early childhood care and education, paid family and medical leave, and long-term services & supports.

All week we are highlighting the stories of what caregivers and care recipients go through now in America, and what can be done to fix it. I'm so proud of this series and think it's coming out exactly when we need it. I hope you do too. Find it all at prospect.org/familycare.