Family caregivers (also known as “carers”) are “relatives, friends, or neighbors who provide assistance related to an underlying physical or mental disability but who are unpaid for those services.” A recent study says that 26.5% of all American adults today are family caregivers. A 2012 report by the Alzheimer’s Association states that 15 million of those family caregivers are caring for a person with Alzheimer’s or another dementia. The value of the voluntary, "unpaid" caregiving service provided by caregivers was estimated at $310 billion in 2006 — almost twice as much as was actually spent on home care and nursing services combined. By 2009, about 61.6 million caregivers were providing "unpaid" care at a value that had increased to an estimated $450 billion. It is projected that nearly