On Monday, a presidential advisory group set a goal to prevent and effectively treat Alzheimer's Disease by 2025. There is much to like about this proposal, but it should come with a consumer warning: There is a lot less to this plan than meets the eye. Let's start with the good news. This initiative is potentially an important step forward as [...]
Want to see the future of adult day programs for the frail elderly and adults with disabilities? Just watch what is happening in California, where 26,000 participants and the centers that care for them are struggling to manage state budget cuts and huge uncertainty. Adult day programs can be a key support for the frail elderly or other adults with [...]
Eighty-give percent of physicians say that unmet social needs lead to worse health outcomes, according to a new survey sponsored by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. But only 20 percent are confident in their ability to help patients and their families meet those needs. Talk about good news and bad news! The survey asked about a wide range of social [...]
Congress is slowly starving senior services programs. In the 2012 budget it passed as it was leaving town last weekend, Congress froze or cut spending for a broad range of government programs aimed at seniors and their caregivers--everything from Meals on Wheels to long-term care ombudsman training to information and referral services. Most of these cuts were not dramatic and only a handful [...]
Government funding for programs to support aging in place was still growing through 2008, but much more slowly than in the past. At the same time, states were making it harder to enroll, limiting benefits, and forcing people to wait longer before they could participate in these programs. And all that was happening before Medicaid home care faced major budget cuts in the face [...]
Why are caregivers for the elderly such bad advocates? There are 40-60 million Americans caring for loved ones yet their needs are widely ignored by the political system. Thus, politicians rarely rouse themselves to do much to help, and when budget-cutting time comes, what little assistance there is often ends up on the block. The inability of caregivers to organize politically was a major topic of [...]
Yesterday, I participated in an AARP program with several authors of books on caregiving. One fellow panelist, the novelist Walter Mosley, was wonderfully provocative as he reflected on what he calls “the great equalizing effect of great age.” Mosley, whose mother was Jewish and whose father was black, put it this way: “White people become black people when they can [...]
On Thursday, I'll be participating in an ambitous program sponsored by AARP where 10 authors will discuss their experiences and views about the challenges of family caregiving. Most of us have had the personal experience of caring for family members and know about the subject first-hand. Some of our books, such as my own Caring for Our Parents, use the personal stories of caregivers to describe the nation's [...]
This week’s failure of the deficit super committee may have saved Medicare and Medicaid from spending reductions for now, but don’t kid yourself: These programs remain squarely in the fiscal bulls-eye. As part of last August’s deal to extend the federal debt limit, Congress agreed that if the super committee was unable to reduce the deficit by $1.2 trillion over [...]
In the wake of the White House decision to abandon the CLASS Act, policy analysts are struggling to find some workable solution to the growing problem of how to finance long-term care costs. So how about using Social Security? One versionof this idea was proposed years ago by Yung-Ping Chen, now professor emeritus of gerontology at the University of Massachusetts. He'd let Social Security recipients trade off a small portion [...]