GBO NEWS: DC GOP & DEMS — ‘EVILNESS,’ CARING, ‘KAFKAESQUE’
GENERATIONS BEAT ONLINE NEWS
E-News of the Journalists Network on Generations
April 16, 2014 — Volume 14, Number 5
Editor’s Note: GBO News, e-news of the Journalists Network on Generation publishes alerts for journalists, producers and authors covering generational issues. Send your news of important stories or books (by you and others), fellowships, awards or pertinent kvetches to GBO News Editor Paul Kleyman. If you receive the table of contents as e-mail, just click through to the full issue at www.gbonews.org.
IN THIS ISSUE: Instant Refunds (Paid in News Tips, Of Course.)
1. THE “EVIL,” THE GOOD & THE UGLY–ANTICS OF GOPs and DEMS: NYT’s Krugman on the “Evilness” of GOP State’s Medicaid Rejection; PBS on GOP Champion for Safer Hospital Discharges; Bipartisan Hot Potato on “Kafkaesque” Payment Recovery from Seniors’ Relatives
2. EYES ON THE PRIZE: Annenberg Health Journalism Fellowship Application Reminder—April 18
3. A WISER WORLD — EXCEPT THAT …: Marc Freedman’s WSJ Tribute to John Garner’s Wisdom of the Ages. And, Well, All Those White Males
4. THE STORYBOARD: Special April Health Affairs Issue on Alzheimer’s and Caregiving; ***Seniors’ Gambling Addiction Series by Melinda Miller of Buffalo News; LGBT Elders Series through April by Matthew Bajko of Bay Area Reporter.
5. GOOD SOURCES: The Best Fact Factory in Age Media–Demographer Cheryl Russell’s “American Consumers Newsletter” and blog
1. THE “EVIL,” THE GOOD & THE UGLY–ANTICS OF GOPs and DEMS
*** “Evilness” on Medicaid: One expects bloggers or columnists to use strident language these days, even one with a Nobel Prize for the sexy science. (Er—isn’t that what they call economics?) Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman is, of course, decidedly ardent–not to mention repeatedly correct in his predictions. If you’re not reading him, you can’t learn or even disagree credibly. But with few exceptions people like health care economist Jonathan Gruber, who played a major role in designing the centrist, market-oriented program called Obamacare, are pretty much a “Dismal Science” bunch, to use the traditional and sexless designation for their profession. So it was surprising to see Krugman’s direct public quote of Gruber in the latter’s New York Times column last Friday (April 11), “Health Care Nightmares,” as follows: “The Medicaid rejection states ‘are willing to sacrifice billions of dollars of injections into their economy in order to punish poor people. It is really almost awesome in its evilness.’”
Also, just to state this editor’s own descriptive preference for any writer, including Krugman, in referring to Republican political actors, rather than rendering blanket condemnations for anyone in the GOP, as in Krugman’s lead (“…Republicans suffer from delusions of disaster”), it shouldn’t inflate one’s word count to write, “Republican (or Democratic) leaders….” I’ve known and interviewed many good and honorable people of the GOP stripe over the years, who might not wince quite as reflexively if commentators give discredit where discredit is due. Party moderates, who have been appalled to see their views (and candidates) driven out of the GOP power base in recent years, might not like any criticism from the left, but at least they shouldn’t be lumped in with policies – and decision makers – whose ideas they never much supported.
***PBS Features GOP State Bill to Expand Caregiver Support: Continuing it’s ongoing coverage of issues in aging, the PBS “News Hour” featured “Easing the Burden of Long-Term Medical Demands for Family Caregivers,” by special correspondent Kathleen McCleery. The lead-in to her report notes, “AARP has begun to advocate for greater caregiver support through public policy and legislation, but the health care industry may be wary of additional regulation.”
McCleery partly focused on the Oklahoma bill, sponsored by GOP State Senator Brian Crain, which, she reported, “would require the hospitals to list the caregiver on the patient’s chart, to notify him or her before the patient is discharged, and to mandate training for the skills they will need when the patient comes home.”
Crain states, “My mother, the last five years of her life, suffered from Alzheimer’s. And I know firsthand, as well as … the rest of my family, the long goodbye that is Alzheimer’s. My father, though, served as her caregiver.” McCleery reports that the Care Act passed the Oklahoma Senate in February and is now before the Oklahoma House. Hawaii, Illinois and New Jersey are considering similar bills.
Opposition, though, is fierce from, guess who? McCleery interviewed Lawanna Halstead, VP of the Oklahoma Hospital Association (OHA): “We just do not feel like that this is a necessary piece of legislation.” She points to the “multipage chapter about discharge planning” in the association’s guidelines regarding Medicare’s conditions of participation (and reimbursement).
Having covered the hospital industry’s appalling negligence on discharge planning for over 30 years—and more recently rooted for the Affordable Care Act’s provision penalizing facilities with unreasonably high readmission levels within 30 days—GBO’s editor has no compunction about sending out a big, “Oy, vey, OHA!” Show us the enforcement—and the sincere efforts to help patients and their families–not just the minimal compliance figures and the money you’re saving.
PBS also posted “Professional Gets Personal as Doctor Considers Care of the Alzheimer’s Caregiver,” by Zachary Treu (April 7), along with “7 tips for successful aging,” by Mary Jo Brooks.
***Meanwhile, the Washington Post’s Story, “Social Security, Treasury Target Taxpayers for Their Parents’ Decades-Old Debts” by Marc Fisher (April 10) proved to have legs enough to run the Boston Marathon. His report on a previously unnoticed and ugly change in federal rules allowing the Social Security Administration (SSA) to confiscate funds from relatives of even deceased beneficiaries years later prompted the agency to back off fast. By Monday, Fisher was able to file this follow-up: “Social Security stops trying to collect on old debts by seizing tax refunds.”
But it could have spun again in later news cycles. That’s because Democrats could have found themselves answering charges of legislative elder abuse. In 2009, a House Dem chaired the committee that allowed in (knowingly or not) a provision in the Farm Bill passed then that changed the rules to allow the Social Security Administration (SSA) to go after family members, such as after an elder has died, for money the system says it overpaid in the distant past.
Democrats were startled enough to move quicker than John Boehner’s pointing finger following the WaPo’s initial report.
Fisher’s April 10 lead: “A few weeks ago, with no notice, the U.S. government intercepted Mary Grice’s tax refunds from both the IRS and the state of Maryland. Grice had no idea that Uncle Sam had seized her money until some days later, when she got a letter saying that her refund had gone to satisfy an old debt to the government — a very old debt.” Grice’s father died in 1960, when she was age four, so her mother, Sadie Grice, got survivor benefits from SSA to help her and her five children. Fischer continues, “Now, Social Security claims it overpaid someone in the Grice family — it’s not sure who — in 1977.” The feds garnished $2,996 from Mary.
SSA has been doing this quietly for three years, based on a sentence stuck in the aforementioned 2009 Farm Bill. It lifts the previous 10-year statute of limitations on old debts owed to the feds. So far SSA has collected $424 million. And guess what: They’ve hired private collections agencies to do the job.
Mary Grice, now 58, sued. Fischer quotes her attorney, Robert Vogel, “The craziest part of this whole thing is the way the government seizes a child’s money to satisfy a debt that child never even knew about.”
Fisher noted, dryly, “No one seems eager to take credit for reopening all these long-closed cases.” SSA says it didn’t seek the change, the Treasury Departments says it wasn’t them, and “congressional staffers say the request probably came from the bureaucracy.”
Progressive Social Security advocates have been scrambling to determine who did what and when since the story first appeared. They worry that such a harsh and questionable policy change–“Kafkaesque” one called the policy—could be attributed to the Dems, because the House Rules Committee chair at the time the bill got through was Rep. Dennis Cardoza, D-Calif., who has since then left Congress. The chatter-sphere notes that, in fact, the George W. Bush administration had unsuccessfully tried to get the provision enacted for years.
Perhaps, one theory goes, Bush-era holdovers in the SSA bureaucracy stuck it into the Farm Bill language at some point under Cardoza’s nose. Keep in mind that the SSA Commissioner is a supposedly depoliticized position. Following a president’s nomination, if confirmed by the Senate, the commissioner has a six-year term and cannot be easily removed, so there’s a built-in measure of independence in the post. President Bush’s choice, Michael Astrue, held the SSA helm well into the Obama presidency.
Still, policy liberals on aging are urged quick action by Dems to halt the collections – again, on debts owned beyond a decade, even taking funds from family members who SSA can’t clearly show received the overpayed money. Fisher’s follow-up noted that “about 400,000 Americans (read voters) who had relatives who owed money to Social Security. In many cases, the people whose refunds were intercepted had never heard of any debt and the debts dated as far back as the middle of the past century.”
2. EYES ON THE PRIZE
***Annenberg Health Journalism Fellowship Application Reminder: Friday (April 18) is the deadline to apply for an all-expenses-paid health journalism training and grants program offered by the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School of Journalism. They have a couple of different fellowship programs that come with stipends of from $2,000-$10,000. Selected reporters will gather in Los Angeles, July 13-17, 2014. For details, visit the Annenberg’s Reporting on Health website or e-mail Martha Shirk at Cahealth@usc.edu.
3. A WISER WORLD — EXCEPT THAT …
Never Go Downhill After 50: That might summarize the advice of the late and great John Gardner, who implemented Medicare as President Johnson’s health secretary, started Common Cause and, among many other accomplishments, inspired author and social entrepreneur Marc Freedman to found what has become Encore.org (a nonprofit promoting later-life careers ”for the greater good” and creator of the Purpose Prize). Freedman’s tribute to Gardner, his prime mentor, appeared earlier this month in the Wall Street Journal.
Much as it is true today, Freedman notes, Gardner commented during the Medicare battles of 1965, that America faced “breathtaking opportunities disguised as insoluble problems.”
Gardner, who died in his 90s in 2002, became committed to the nation’s need to fully engage people at any age. Freedman quotes his statement, “All my feelings about the release of human possibilities, all of my convictions about renewal, are offended by the widely shared cultural assumption that life levels off in one’s 40s and 50s and heads downhill, so that by 65 you are scrap heap material.” He continued, in part, “What I want for those youngsters in their 40s and 50s is several more decades of vital learning and growth.”
Except that . . . Freedman’s tribute to Gardner, a contribution to the news site’s “My Model for Retirement” series, appears on the WSJ ‘s “The Experts” page dedicated to discussions by authorities on issues in aging. (The section links to the paper’s broader “Journal Report” on Retirement.) It’s hard not to miss, though, that the gallery of experts running alongside Freedman’s column shows 16 faces—some of them people this editor has long admired. They include 15 whites, 10 of them male. The lone non-white photo belongs to the eloquent Sarah Lawrence-Lightfoot, author of The Third Chapter: Passion, Risk, and Adventure in the 25 Years After 50.) Perhaps there are other non-white WSJ retirement experts, but they weren’t evident on this or related WSJ pages. When so much of the mainstream national media continues to lump together retirees in the affluent white boomer image, the baby boom generation’s actual diversity in class and ethnicity is not well served by this inexpert imbalance.
4. THE STORYBOARD
***Special April Health Affairs Issue on Alzheimer’s and Caregiving: Health Affairs, the health policy journal, has devoted its April issue to Alzheimer’s and caregiving. The issue, says an online summary, “addresses the litany of public and personal ramifications of Alzheimer’s disease—the most expensive condition in the United States both in terms of real costs and the immeasurable toll on loved ones. Articles examine best practices and models of care; a global view of the disease; the effects on caregivers; and what may lie ahead for a disproportionately underfunded research community.”
Although access to many articles is limited to subscribers, reporters not already subscribed should be able to obtain articles via the journal’s Communications Director Sue Ducat at press@healthaffairs.org or (301) 841-9962. See the issue’s Table of Contents, or a summary.
*** You Can Bet on Journalist in Aging Fellows: The latest postings by reporters among this year’s Journalists in Aging Fellows program, includes the package on seniors’ gambling addiction by Melinda Miller of the Buffalo News. Here are the links: Part 1 — “As Seniors Gamble for Fun, Some Find Only Trouble,” Part 2 — “Senior Centers’ Casino Trips Help Drive Gambling Addiction.”
And LGBT elders are the subject of the ambitions four-part Fellowship series through April by Matthew S. Bajko of Bay Area Reporter, the nationally respected San Francisco-based weekly. The series kicked off with “Trauma of AIDS Epidemic Impacts Aging Survivors” and “LGBT Latino Seniors Face Housing Crunch, Isolation in San Francisco.” On tap for the coming week are how LGBT seniors center programs in New York and San Francisco are combatting isolation among LGBT seniors, and a look at how older LGBT blacks face double discrimination—racism and ageism in the LGBT community and anti-gay bias among African Americans.
The Fellowship program is a collaboration between New America Media’s and the Gerontological Society of America, in cooperation with the Journalists Network on Generations (publisher of GBONews.org. It is sponsored this year by the MetLife Foundation, Watch this space for the announcement soon of the program’s 2014 application deadline.
5. GOOD SOURCES
The Best Fact Factory in Aging: Demographer Cheryl Russell’s “American Consumers Newsletter” and blog are an online subscription must for reporters on the generations beat. Unlike the factoid-of-the-mill grind, Russell’s factual grains offer context and links to a wide range of sources and on a broad spectrum of subjects that arc out from research on consumer interests.
Just for instance, Russell’s recent “Demo Memo” blog and monthly e-news (it clusters a sampler of the concise blogs) alerted readers to the 2014 Retirement Confidence Survey. Russell noted, “The 2014 results are worrisome, revealing that a substantial 36 percent of workers have less than $1,000 in savings. Even among workers aged 55 or older, one in four has saved less than $1,000.”
Another item reported on the Urban Institute Health Reform Monitoring Survey –which you now know exists, if you didn’t before. It showed, she wrote on April 3, that among18-to-64-year-olds without health insurance, 12.4% were uncovered in the states that expanded Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, while 18.1% remained without health insurance in states not expanding Medicaid (thanks to the evilness of those GOP governors).
Meanwhile, Russell blogged (April 07), “There’s a yawning gap in the pension participation of older workers by income. The Center for Retirement Research (CRR) of Boston College analyzed 1992 to 2010 data from the Health and Retirement Study to determine why this gap exists and what can be done about it.” Among lower and lower-middle-income workers (with household incomes below 300% of the Federal Poverty Level (FPL), ages 50-58, only one in five (19%) participated in a pension at their workplace. For those over three times the FPL, more than half (56%) are in an employer pension program.
CRR’s analysis shows that “the gap is caused primarily by the lower employment rate of low-income individuals (they can’t get a job) and the lower probability that those with a job will be offered a pension by their employer (they can’t get a good job). The study concludes, “Policies such as automatic enrollment that focus on pension eligibility or take-up are unlikely to close the pension coverage gap.” Russell adds, “There’s no quick fix for closing the gap, they say, because it will require not only more jobs, but more ‘good jobs.’”
Elsewhere in her e-news, Russell asks, “What Happened to the Inheritance Boom?” Remember predictions that boomers would inherit billions and become “the richest elders in history?” Well, she says, a new study in The Journal of Economic Inequality in the Monthly Labor Review, shows, “Rather than increasing as a share of household net worth during the 1989 to 2007 time period, the inheritance share fell from 29 to just 19 percent. Where did the money go?”
Although no one knows for sure, Russell offers this theory: “The prime suspect in the disappearance of all those billions is the health care industry. Perfectly positioned to siphon family wealth from long-lived elders, the health care industry has transformed the long-awaited inheritance boom into a health care facilities, services, and salary boom.”
As evidence, Russell cites an Oct. 2013 analysis by the Employee Benefit Research Institute, revealing that on top of Medicare coverage, the average 65-plus male needs $122,000 “to cover 90 percent of his out-of-pocket health care costs in retirement.” Women, who live longer than men, need $139,000. Russell adds, “Those numbers are conservative because they do not include the extraordinary cost of long-term care. Those numbers might explain why the inheritance boom is a bust.”
One more item from Russell (April 4): “According to a survey by the Pew Research Internet Project, fully 77 percent of people aged 65 or older own a cell phone, including the majority of people aged 80 or older.” But, Pew found, smart phone ownership dried up fast in the senior set, with those 65 to 69 at 29% and people 80-plus at 5%.
That includes GBO’s curmudgeonly editor (age 68), who gets along just fine so far with a no-plan dumb phone. My ring tone is, “Go ahead and steal this piece of junk.”
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