Tag: seniors

General interest/Health/Money/Politics & Causes/USA
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Will Anti-Abortionists Sink Health Reform?

by Fran Johns

Already the right wing, Catholic officialdom and Sarah Palin have won their battle to make sure that I, and countless other millions, will likely die only after expensive, prolonged, futile, aggressive, undesirable treatment rather than peacefully at home as I choose. Now they want the generations younger to be sure that any accidental, criminal or otherwise unplanned pregnancy results in another unwanted child coming into this overpopulated world. An assault on health reform is their latest battleground. I am careful to say Catholic officialdom, because all of the lay Catholics I know, many of them Good Catholics, support both reproductive and end-of-life choice. I am careful to mention Sarah Palin just to prove I have absolutely no resentment over the fact that whereas I can’t interest publishers in my several excellent book projects, she has a planned first run of 1.5 million on her dashed-off memoir.

But back to the problem at hand. Writing in Tuesday’s New York Times, David Kirkpatrick presents the new scary problem:

As if it were not complicated enough, the debate over health care in Congress is becoming a battlefield in the fight over abortion.

Abortion opponents in both the House and the Senate are seeking to block the millions of middle- and lower-income people who might receive federal insurance subsidies to help them buy health coverage from using the money on plans that cover abortion. And the abortion opponents are getting enough support from moderate Democrats that both sides say the outcome is too close to call. Opponents of abortion cite as precedent a 30-year-old ban on the use of taxpayer money to pay for elective abortions.

Abortion-rights supporters say such a restriction would all but eliminate from the marketplace private plans that cover the procedure, pushing women who have such coverage to give it up. Nearly half of those with employer-sponsored health plans now have policies that cover abortion, according to a study by the Kaiser Family Foundation.

Never mind that Obama has promised that no federal funds will go for elective abortions, and the current policies would remain unchanged, here is a handy opportunity to make points with conservatives and throw a monkey wrench into the works of reform.

Lawmakers pushing the abortion restrictions say they feel the momentum is on their side, especially because the restlessness of other Democratic moderates is making every vote count.At least 31 House Democrats have signed various recent letters to the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, urging her to allow a vote on a measure to restrict use of the subsidies to pay for abortion, including 25 who joined more than 100 Republicans on a letter delivered Monday.

Representative Bart Stupak of Michigan, a leading Democratic abortion opponent, said he had commitments from 40 Democrats to block the health care bill unless they have a chance to include the restrictions.

So it’s all about halting abortion — maybe — or all about halting reform — maybe — but some of us who simply, desperately, wish better care and a few decent options for our less-advantaged citizens are left to wonder what it’s really all about.

Abortion Fight Complicates Debate on Health Care – Readers’ Comments – NYTimes.com.

General interest/Health/Money/Politics & Causes/USA
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Hanging in the 'hood – a good option for boomers and beyonders and the economy

by Fran Johns

Say you’re happy in your ‘hood. The sights are familiar, the neighbors are okay, the comfort level is high. Now say you’re 70-something or 80-something and you need a little help now and then, bringing in the papers, getting to doctors’ appointments, changing light bulbs. Do you really want to pull up roots and move to a totally new environment, re-learn where everything is, make new friends among people who never knew your children (or your parents)? The latter is being chosen every day for or by seniors in America; the former is spurring a movement with an interesting variety of formats under the general heading of Aging in Place. I really want an umbrella acronym for this category, but I don’t really want to be an AIP.

On her New Old Age blog for the New York Times a few days ago Paula Span wrote about her dad’s life in a NORC.

In my father’s apartment building in South Jersey, the older tenants start drifting into the small lobby each day around 1 p.m., taking up positions on chairs and couches. The ostensible reason: The mail is about to arrive. The real reason: They relish a chance to schmooze.

“There’s a lot of discussion about the economy,” Dad reports. “And what the president said about the police and that fellow in Massachusetts.” Lesser issues arise, too. Whose daughter is coming to visit. What is on sale at the ShopRite supermarket.

Twenty-five years ago, a University of Wisconsin professor coined a great term for this kind of residence. It is a naturally occurring retirement community, or NORC. The place wasn’t built for seniors; its tenants are all ages, infants through nonagenarians. But a substantial number of residents have been there long enough to grow old together.

Since he still drives, my father heads out each morning to buy the papers, which get passed from one apartment to another. (God forbid you should squander 50 cents for your own copy and read the headlines before suppertime.) He ferries friends to doctors’ appointments. He benefits, too: his pal Manny comes by several times a day to check on him, and neighbors stock his fridge with soup and strudel.

NORCs exist all over; probably half of Miami Beach, Fla., was a NORC at one time. Watching this little community cope with shopping and banking and constant medical visits, I have wondered why services can’t be brought to these residents. Wouldn’t it be more efficient to have a nurse visit weekly, instead of each person making a laborious trip to a doctor’s office? For the senior van to schedule regular excursions to ShopRite? For the high school orchestra to give concerts in the community room, since so few older residents go out after dark?

A number of NORCs do offer this kind of help. Twenty-five states have NORC supportive service programs, according to the queen of NORCs, Fredda Vladeck, who runs the United Hospital Fund’s Aging in Place Initiative. New York leads the list with 54 NORC programs operating in high-rises, garden apartment complexes and neighborhoods of single-family homes; Indiana comes in second. The common mission of the programs, Ms. Vladeck said, is “transforming communities into good places to grow old.”

NORC’s and their cousins the Village aging-in-place concepts are multiplying, but they’re nothing new. They’ve been around for more than a quarter of a century (if you discount the automatic NORCs that small towns and Native American communities offered in ancient America afforded. And they’re proven effective. “Numerous studies have documented the benefits and potential of NORCs, including a Senate report (PDF), a foundation grant report and a graduate thesis,” Span writes.

So why, after 25 years’ experience, are there not more support programs for the millions of older Americans already living in NORCs, and the millions more to come?

Ms. Vladeck, accustomed to lobbying and testifying and organizing, sounded philosophical. “It’s incubating,” she said. “Sometimes, innovation takes a long time.”

If you want to keep your parents out of nursing homes, or want to stay out of a nursing home yourself, learning about how these alternatives work isn’t a bad way to start the plan.  There may not be a long time left, at the rate America’s getting older.

When the Neighborhood Is the Retirement Village – The New Old Age Blog – NYTimes.com.

General interest/Health/Money/Politics & Causes/USA
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Some Women's Views of Health Reform

by Fran Johns

First Lady Michelle Obama is making the news in support of her husband’s health plan, hoping to tap into the energies of one group who voted for Obama in large numbers: women. Reform is everyone’s concern, but in many ways it occupies a specific gender niche. As reported by Voice of America’s Kent Klein,

Mrs. Obama says health care reform is a women’s issue. “Women play a unique and increasingly significant role in our families.  We know the pain, because we are usually the ones dealing with it,” she said. The first lady spoke Friday to a gathering of women near the White House, and said the state of the U.S. health care system is unacceptable. “For two years on the campaign trail, this was what I heard from women:  That they were being crushed, crushed by the current structure of our health care.  Crushed,” she said.

A host of women’s groups, blogs, newsletters and web writers have also recently joined in. Posting in the National Women’s Law Center blog, Outreach Manager Thao Nguyen told the poignant story of hearing from a friend that she’d just married her long-time hesitant boyfriend. The marriage news was good news, but its terms took the joy out: having lost her job, it was the only way she could get health insurance.

Her point seemed so logical, but the entire idea was couched in such an insane reality I was simply speechless. Lucy is in her early 30s but she has a pre-existing condition so buying individual health insurance and the unfair, overpriced premiums that come with it was out of the question. Lucy has been living with Dan for 10 years, but unfortunately, he works for a company that doesn’t offer domestic partner benefits.

I couldn’t help but think: is this what our broken, unstable health care system means for millions of Americans around the country? As the economy continues to struggle, employers continue to shed jobs, and every day 14,000 more Americans wake up realizing that they are now uninsured and just one illness away from financial ruin. Are reluctant bachelors around the country going to put away their Megan Fox posters, cancel the “poker nights” (aka X-Box marathons we’re on to you), and start settling down?

My own run-in with healthcare weirdness is minor in comparison to most, but I still remember the shock. Making a routine call to renew the prescription for a bone-building drug I had taken for years to stave off osteoporosis, the message center person said she probably should warn me that rather than the $24 co-pay I’d been having per quarter my cost would now be $230. I do need these bones, but couldn’t see them worth $920 a year. I hung up and started drinking more milk. Had to get breast cancer, for which I now take a covered post- cancer drug which my oncologist prescribes… mainly to keep my bones healthy. Something is bizarre here.

Or maybe we women might bend the old macho adage a little: It’s broke, fix it.

VOA News – Michelle Obama Joins Health Reform Campaign.

General interest/Money/Politics & Causes/USA
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Will consumerism rise again?

by Fran Johns

For some reason, maybe it’s the stock market, maybe it’s just wishful thinking-of-anything-but-wars-&-health-reform, consumerism is all over the news of late. Summer tourists didn’t tour as much or buy enough, clunkers were eagerly turned in for cars, caution abounds in the land. People are even beginning to save for the rainy days that have not yet cloudburst upon them.

A closer look at all this was taken through a couple of recent studies reported on by the San Francisco Chronicle’s Tom Abate this morning. Abate focuses on California, but the trends are all over.

California will trail the nation in emerging from the Great Recession, as consumers save more and spend less in a behavior shift that will slow growth and job creation in the short term but eventually lead to a stronger economy.

That message emerged from two separate reports released Tuesday by the UCLA Anderson Forecast and Beacon Economics, a consulting practice with offices in San Rafael.

Both forecasts characterized California as the epicenter of back-to-back consumption binges fueled by the dot-com boom and the housing bubble, and argued that now the state faces big adjustments as it recovers from ills that have long plagued the U.S. economy.

“Consumers have been on a spending binge ever since 1995,” said Jon Haveman with Beacon Economics, as soaring 401(k)s and, later, inflated home prices made Americans feel so wealthy they stopped saving money.

California, of course, rather outdid itself in the business of spending too much, buying too much and borrowing to do more of the same, but none of this was peculiar to the left coast.

It did not go unremarked, however, by one of the current candidates for Mayor of New York, Rev. Billy. You don’t know Rev. Billy of the Church of Stop Shopping? You’ve been missing something. The Rev, probably going on the ballot as Bill Talen, does not get the coverage that other candidates do, but he is dead serious about his mission and pretty raucous about delivering the message. He is seriously running for Mayor. He doesn’t like consumerism, or the corporate takeover of America, or war. At times his church becomes the Church of Stop the Bombing. In any event, if we’d been listening to Rev. Billy all these years we might have missed getting in quite so deep a mess — but we’d also have missed a lot of Starbucks lattes.

Now comes word that senior shopping at Walgreen, Rite-Aid and Family Dollar stores is going to be made more comfortable, just in time for Boomers to start turning 65 in 2011. According to a recent Wall Street Journal story by Ellen Byron, in one exercise designed to help participants in a Kimberly-Clark program understand the difficulties confronting senior shoppers, Kimberly-Clark executive Don Quigley tried going through the aisles with dark-tinted glasses, un-popped popcorn in his shoes and his thumbs taped to his palms. This rather hurts my senior-shopper feelings if it is how Rite-Aid sees me, but I will try to appreciate the effort.

It appears that we current savers/cautious spenders are not expected to change back to rampant consumerism overnight, which is good news to the senior seniors of us, brought up so rigorously in the save-first-spend-later mode that we feel better within it anyway.

Ed Leamer, director of the UCLA Anderson Forecast, said consumers usually roar back from recessions with spending that lifts production and fuels hiring, but he thinks that is unlikely during this recovery because Americans have been living beyond their means for too long – borrowing too much and importing more than the country sells abroad.”We need to turn our shopping malls into factories,” Leamer said “Our economy over the next decade is going to have to build more of the stuff we buy.”

Haveman said the painful adjustments now under way should eventually benefit California and the Bay Area, which lead in technology, biotechnology, clean energy and other cutting-edge industries.

“The light at the end of the tunnel is visible, but it’s still a long way off,” he said.

That business about turning shopping malls into factories and living within means — that’s going to please Rev. Billy.

Fundamental economic shift underlies recovery.

General interest
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Health Reform Geezer Gap

by Fran Johns

At least one more old geezer — we are legion — is fed up with the Medicare generation getting all the blame for opposing health reform. James Ridgeway writes in his Unsilent Generation blog today that

This health reform debate is about substituting a phony intergenerational war for what ought to be class war – pitting the old against the young, instead of pitting the rich against the poor, or the corporations against the little guy. There WILL be cuts to Medicare, and everyone says this has to happen to keep Medicare from going bankrupt before younger people get to use it. But in fact, if pols were willing to cut the profits of insurance and drug companies, there would be enough for everyone–we could have Medicare for all.

Which does certainly cut to the chase. Ridgeway cites his own earlier writing that applied Dean Baker’s chutzpah definition to today’s economy.

The classic definition of “chutzpah” is the kid who kills both of his parents and then begs for mercy because he is an orphan. The Wall Street crew are out to top this. After wrecking the economy with their convoluted finances, and tapping the US Treasury for trillions in bail-out bucks, they now want to cut Social Security and Medicare because we don’t have the money.

I am still with President Obama on paying for reform through elimination of waste and fraud, though that’s obviously not going to happen overnight and not going to pay for it all by a long shot. But Medicare’s going to survive, as will most Medicare recipients although we are all terminal. The moments of truth will come when the bargaining is over and we learn what the trade-offs really cost. That is, whether Big Pharma and insurance industry negotiations trump the public option, and other details still near and dear to many hearts.

So many trillions, so many sectors looking to save their own skins — or their own trillions, as the case may be — can boggle the mind quickly enough to send Jane Q. Public desperately in search of simplification, and blaming a generation is easy. The Medicares don’t want to lose their benefits, the Boomers worry that there won’t be enough for them (a legitimate worry, in fact) and the people who need health care get lost in the shuffle. Ridgeway fills in a lot of blanks. Check it out.

General interest
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Saving for Retirement: Take Two

by Fran Johns

About those initiatives to encourage Americans to save for retirement (see below)? There are those around the country who would say, Phooey. Or possibly something stronger.

Born in the 1930s, ’40s and ’50s, these are people who did everything right: they saved a respectable percentage of all earnings, invested cautiously in companies that seemed to be socially and fiscally responsible, some of which were supposed to be subject to regulation, and switched funds to other choices when those companies acted badly. They paid off their mortgages and credit cards on time (credit card companies never liked them) and lived within budgets. Most of these folks raised their own children on the time-honored formula that said when you have a dollar you give ten cents to your church or synagogue, ten cents to charity, put ten cents into U.S. Savings Bonds, etc, etc, and only with the last five cents would you buy an ice cream cone.

These citizens have now watched their IRAs fade to nothing and their investments income disappear. Want an example? That $10,000 carefully saved for a cash cushion in case of an emergency and invested in a money market fund or savings account once could be counted on to grow, or to pay for a weekend trip. Now, thanks to the Fed’s target rate for fed funds it might earn $25 in a year. The citizens do not notice any hardship, meanwhile, being visited upon the CEOs of those investment fund companies, or anybody at Goldman Sachs.

Beyond saying Phooey a lot, these citizens are worried. The same people who got them in the mess Mr. Obama inherited now seem to be running the economic show in Washington. The citizens want universal healthcare, but can’t help wondering if they’re going to be sunk, themselves, by a catastrophe for which they no longer have funds. The citizens can’t exactly re-enter the workplace.

In short, the prospect of golden years ahead for others is not ameliorating the tarnish of their own.

Money/Politics & Causes/USA
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Saving for Retirement Just Got Easier

by Fran Johns

Those Golden Years we used to hear about might yet come to pass for some — if the Obama administration gets its message across. The New York Times’ Edmund L. Andrews reported Sunday on four new initiatives aimed at helping Americans put aside something for the rainy days of their retirement.

President Obama, noting that millions of Americans do not have enough savings to cover their retirement, announced a package of initiatives on Saturday to spur increased savings.

The administrative actions, which do not require new legislation from Congress, are intended to make it easier and more automatic for people to put money into tax-advantaged retirement accounts.

The new initiatives address a substantial audience. “Half of America’s work force doesn’t have access to a retirement plan at work,” Obama said. “And fewer than 10 percent of those without workplace retirement plans have one of their own.”

Based on “behavioral research,” the initiatives include savings-encouraging devices such as automatic enrollment plans for retirement savings accounts, check-off boxes on tax returns allowing for refunds in the form of U.S. savings bonds, or the payment of unused vacation time or overtime into retirement accounts.

White House officials said the new initiatives would go into effect immediately and come on top of two related proposals that Mr. Obama sent to Congress as part of his budget.

One would compel all but the smallest employers to offer retirement savings plans, and the other would expand the saver’s tax credit, which matches a family’s savings up to $1,000 a year.

Mr. Obama’s mother would probably be bewildered by the need for such initiatives. Savings devices, from employer-sponsored automatic enrollment plans to the ridiculous no-interest Christmas Club monthly deposits so popular with banks (and even with rational people who proclaimed this the only way to accumulate holiday funds), were ubiquitous a generation or two ago. They managed at least to keep a lot of people from going into credit card debt.

Perhaps, if the instant gratification/super-consumer movement can be made to co-exist with the President’s plans, some balance of spending and savings will return to working Americans. Now, if a few more Americans can just find jobs…

via Obama Outlines Retirement Initiatives – NYTimes.com.

Health/Money/Politics & Causes/USA
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New Way to Count Old Poor

by Fran Johns

As if there weren’t enough bad news to go around, a new(ish) formula for calculating the national poverty rate could boost the number of over-65 poor from 9.7 percent — or 3.6 million of us — to 8.6 percent, or a hefty 6.8 million. Just like that, the poor get poorer; or in any event they get to be more of us.

It’s not really a new formula, it’s a revision of the half-century-old National Academy of Science’s formula…

which is gaining credibility with public officials, including some in the Obama administration. The original formula, created in 1955, doesn’t take account of rising costs of medical care and other factors.

If the academy’s formula is adopted, a more refined picture of American poverty could emerge that would capture everyday costs of necessities besides food. The result could upend long-standing notions of those in greatest need and lead eventually to shifts in how billions of federal dollars for the poor are distributed for health, housing, nutrition and child-care benefits.

Using this formula, overall poverty in the U.S. would rise to an estimated 15.3 percent, or 45.7 million.

The current calculation sets the poverty level at three times the annual cost of groceries. For a family of four that is $21,203. That calculation does not factor in rising medical, transportation, child care and housing expenses or geographical variations in living costs.

I’m not at all sure my current family of two could eat (OK, and drink too, with an occasional dinner out) on $21,203. It may certainly be time for a re-calculation. And a little more help.

via New measure doubles number of elderly poor.

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