July 2, 2025

Bradley Cooper’s Caregiving Reminds Us Who’s Really Holding Families Together

News

All Topics

Share Post

• Share article to Facebook
• Share article to LinkedIn

The new documentary, Caregiving, comes at a critical moment. As Congress weighs major decisions that could impact families across the country for years to come, this film offers something powerful to inform those deliberations. It provides a window into the lives of family caregivers, and a lesson on the pivotal points in time in our recent history when we’ve chosen to go big (or not) to build systems of care to support American workers and families.

We understand the demands and delights of managing a loved one’s care when we take the caregiving journey. Bradley Cooper, an executive producer of the film, says he was inspired by his experience as a part of the care team for his father who lived with lung cancer, and Uzo Aduba, the film’s narrator, raised her daughter while caring for her mother who had pancreatic cancer.

I’ve worked on behalf of older adults, people with disabilities, and their family and professional caregivers for nearly 40 years. There has been many a moment that has broadened my understanding of what caregiving families live with every day: the parents who learned to manage health care tasks around-the-clock for their children born with complex medical conditions because there weren’t enough nurses to provide that care; the 80 year old man who, when asked what he needed to help care for the love of his life who was in the final days of living with Alzheimer’s, asked only for someone to help him get her back to bed at the end of the day; my Aunt Margaret who exhausted herself and died too early after many years of juggling a full-time job as a nurse at the local hospital and caring for my grandmother at home.

Caregiving doesn’t just tell our stories. It gives them weight. Visibility. Urgency. And that urgency is real. The conversation about caregiving is happening in families, in state legislatures, and in Congress. The film will certainly advance public awareness, but more voices like those elevated in this film are needed now to help the nation understand what’s at stake. Congress is currently considering budget bills that would reshape the Medicaid program and caregiver support programs funded through the Older Americans Act.

Now is one of those moments that caregivers know well—when we come to the end of a long day and think we can’t do one more thing, but we do. This is the time to do that one more thing and let our representatives hear from us. Nobody knows better than we do about the extra hours we spend each week managing Medicaid paperwork, about the fragility of the systems on which we rely to keep our commitments to our loved ones that they will be able to continue to live at home, and about the choices we make to defer our own health care needs so we can take care of the people who raised us and need us now.

The families and care workers profiled in Caregiving, and all of those currently serving as caregivers, deserve to know that our commitment to family and care was considered by Members of Congress as they decided the future of the programs that have long been an essential part of our country’s care infrastructure.

Caregiving, a PBS documentary from Executive Producer Bradley Cooper, explores the emotional highs and lows caregivers face as part of their deeply personal journey. It premiered on PBS on June 24 and is available for streaming on PBS.org.

Rachel Richards is Senior Vice President of Government Programs & Government Relations at Careforth. She leads our business development activities in government programs, working primarily with state Medicaid agencies and managed care organizations to implement solutions that support family caregivers. She also develops and implements our engagement strategy with state and federal agencies. She is currently an intermittent caregiver for her fabulous mum.