Another WA Cares email is out and inviting providers to sign up to give long-term care to beneficiaries of the program. Beneficiaries are workers and former workers who paid into the program long enough and meet its care-needs requirements.
Before the state recruits more family caregivers — a group state leaders and supporters have repeatedly highlighted — it should answer a question about providers’ paychecks: Why should caring for a spouse or parent require sending some of that money to a union?
The long-term care (LTC) program’s full lifetime benefit starts at $36,500. That is not an annual allowance. And CareScout’s 2026 cost estimates put 20 hours per week of nonmedical home care in Washington state at more than $4,000 each month. That is about nine months of care. People needing more hours of in-home care each week — or years of paid assistance at home or in institutional care — will exhaust that benefit long before their needs disappear. For care in a nursing home, the money could be gone in less than three months.
That makes every dollar matter. Yet family caregivers who become employees of Consumer Direct Care Network Washington, or CDWA, enter its union employment structure. CDWA’s WA Cares FAQ explicitly says even someone caring only for a WA Cares beneficiary must join SEIU 775. Its collective-bargaining agreement provides for union dues or fees.
A registered nonunion home care agency is an alternative, if it will hire the family member and if the family caregiver goes searching for one. But that still requires agency employment and supervision. The state’s published guidance offers no separate route allowing a family caregiver to be paid directly without either employer.
Union representation may appeal to professional caregivers. A wife caring for her husband may want no such relationship. Requiring financial support for a union she neither wants nor needs is an abuse of earnings collected from workers in the name of future long-term care.
Money drawn from a limited benefit should support care and the person providing it, not strengthen a union.
These concerns have rightly surfaced inside the Long-Term Services and Supports Trust Commission for more than a year. At a September 2025 meeting, Sen. Curtis King, R-Yakima, argued that family members should be able to provide paid care without joining a union. And AARP’s Cathy MacCaul warned: “The existing model is not going to work for family caregivers.” She added, “They are going to feel deceived.” Laura Cepoi, representing Area Agencies on Aging, also supported a third option tailored to family caregivers, particularly spouses and people sharing a home.
Their objections were about respecting family relationships and offering meaningful choice. State law expressly allows a third payment option if recommended by the commission and adopted by the Department of Social and Health Services. Yet benefits are already being paid, and that option remains absent from the enrollment instructions. Families should not have to wait for meaningful choice while the state recruits them into the existing employment structure.
WA Cares' broader problems remain. WA Cares takes 0.58% of covered wages, and not everyone paying will need long-term care. Even contributors who do need LTC services must satisfy contribution requirements that some won't. For those who are eligible one day, a modest lifetime cap leaves substantial exposure to prolonged care costs — and the state has told them that they can rest easy with WA Cares. They can't. Washingtonians should be encouraged to save money for all of life's needs, including this one.
And WA Cares is no safety net. Benefits do not depend on financial need. People able to finance their own care can qualify, while Medicaid already provides long-term care assistance to people meeting financial and functional requirements – without taking a portion of their wages. Strengthening that safety net does not require making more workers dependent on a separate state benefit and burdening workers, including low-income workers, who are trying to make ends meet in our high cost-of-living state.
The original law claimed that WA Cares would relieve family hardship. Requiring unwanted union payments as part of a family’s care arrangement is hardly relief.
Washington Policy Center has long warned that WA Cares appears designed to strengthen a union, not provide adequate LTC to all Washingtonians. When the state protects and promotes an employment structure that delivers family caregivers to a powerful union, whose interests are coming first?
Before another recruitment email lands, the state should deliver the family option. Beneficiaries of WA Cares need more helping hands, not more hands in caregivers' paychecks.