GBO NEWS: Hispanic Care Project Wins Emmy; Elder Justice Act; Fed Bill’s Pension Theft; & More
GENERATIONS BEAT ONLINE NEWS
E-News of the Journalists Network on Generations
December 18, 2014 — Volume 14, Number 15
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: Respite from the 24/7 Christmas Carol Cycle.
1. GEN BEATLES NEWS: A Big NY Times Boost for “Homes on the Range” Film; ***Terra Nova Films’ Wins Emmy on Hispanic Caregiving Project
2. THE STORY BOARD: “The Kindness of Strangers,” Barbara Peters Smith’s Sarasota Herald Tribune Series on How Courts Abet the Theft of Seniors’ Civil Rights; ***Senate Aging Panel Looks at Debit Card Scams; ***NPR Series on Hospice; ***Washington Post’s “Consumer Guide to Hospice.”
3. FISCAL REFORM SCHOOL: Congress’s “Cromnibus” Budget Bill Giveth (the Elder Justice Act) and Taketh Away (Many Pensions, If Not the Thin Scrim Between You and Your Wallet); ***New Social Security Works! Book.
4. EYES ON THE PRIZE: Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ) Awards Deadline Feb. 6; ***Excellence in Health Care Journalism Entry Deadline Jan. 16.
1. GEN BEATLES NEWS
*** A Big NYT “Science Times” Boost Tuesday for “Homes on the Range,” the remarkable new documentary by Harry Wiland, Dale Bell and Beverly Baroff of the Media Policy Center in Santa Monica, and their subject, the Green House alternative nursing homes of geriatrician Bill Thomas, MD. Get a big boost in this week’s “Science Times” section (Dec. 16). Veteran health columnist Jane Brody explains that the new film follows up on development of Thomas’ first Green House a decade ago in Tupelo, Miss.
The Harvard-educated Thomas co-created the Green House project as a new model for long-term care, small, “nurturing environment where elders and the frail can thrive,” Brody writes.
Today there are 167 Green Houses in 27 states, serving 1,735 people, with four more locations “soon to join the movement,” plus 108 others in development around the United States, Brody reports.
Calling “Homes on the Range an “inspiring new documentary”, Brody goes on, “Green House residents, whose care is financed by Medicaid, Medicare or private funds, live in cottages with private rooms and private baths. They participate, when able, in food preparation and eat in a communal setting that is more like a home dining room than a cafeteria. Unlike the regimented meals in nursing homes, Green House residents are free to choose when to eat.”
Brody cites Thomas’ book, Second Wind, (Simon & Schuster, 2014), written “to help people reimagine the latter half of life.” She quotes Thomas from the film, “No one wants to live in a nursing home.” Yet, he continues, “if you reach the age of 65, you have a 50 percent chance of spending a significant amount of time in a nursing home.”
She goes on, “Thomas deplores what he calls ‘the medicalization of old age’ — treatment of aging as a disease for which there is no cure, with medical care usually provided in an institutional setting. Too often, the impersonal, highly structured life in nursing homes precipitates an accelerated decline in physical and mental abilities. Residents may become rapidly helpless, noncommunicative, even catatonic.”
Homes on the Range brings the development of Green Houses full circle. The Media Policy Center’s original 25-minute film on the Tupelo facility inspired Carmen Rideout to spearhead the years-long effort to finance and build the Sheridan home.
In a separate review of the film, Tim Mullaney of McKnight’s Long-Term Care News, a leading industry publication, comments, “I especially appreciated how the documentary realistically portrays the Green House project. Thomas is a tireless and inspiring promoter for Green Houses, and he has been joined by many other passionate advocates. I think that’s all to the good, but I also think that sometimes the Green House cheerleading can sound a bit like one-sided propaganda, which seriously downplays the often substantial challenges in building these facilities and figuring out the most effective ways of providing care and measuring outcomes in this still-young model.”
Brody notes that the Media Policy Center, which Bell and Wiland established as a nonprofit years ago to go after grant funding for their decidedly PBS-oriented subjects, is providing online Vimeo access to everything from a short trailer to the 85-minute feature-length version for theatric release. Check the Media Policy Center’s website. GBONews, though, found the clips a bit hard to locate, so it you have trouble, drop a quick note to Dale Bell (dale@mediapolicycenter.org) or call him at 310-828-2966 or 818-398-4562.
***Terra Nova Films’ Emmy Winner on Hispanic Caregiving: Terra Nova Films’ production, “Compassion for Those We Love: A Town Meeting on Family Caregiving for Alzheimer’s in the Hispanic Community” picked up an Emmy Award last month in Chicago from the Midwest Chapter of the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences. Originally broadcast on Univision Chicago, the program will be distributed nationally by PBS this coming April.
The program, build around a live Town Meeting along with a series of videos streamed at Terra Nova’s www.videoasistencia.org, constitutes a rare educational initiative linguistically and culturally sensitive for Hispanic American caregivers. Because the content includes information useful for non-Latinos, the program now includes English subtitles.
Town meeting producer Ed Menaker noted in an e-mail that there are over 200,000 Hispanic seniors in the United States with Alzheimer’s disease. The Alzheimer’s Association expects that to increase to 1.3 million by 2050. By then, U.S. Census Bureau projects that Latinos will have the greatest life expectancy of any ethnic group in the country, averaging 87 years. (It’s been called the ‘Hispanic paradox,” because Latinos actually live longer on average than any ethnic demographic, but also have among the highest levels of chronic illness.)
Menaker added, “Studies suggest that many Hispanics may have more risk factors for developing dementia than other groups (diabetes, high blood pressure) and a significant number appear to be getting Alzheimer’s earlier. And surveys indicate that Latinos, less likely to see doctors because of financial and language barriers, more often mistake dementia symptoms for normal aging, delaying diagnosis.”
The production features such experts as Maria Carrillo, MD, vice president of Medical and Scientific Affairs for The national Alzheimer’s Association, and Alzheimer’s researcher Maria Marquine, of the University of California, San Diego. And the program features “human stories of the caregiving crisis.”
2. THE STORY BOARD
*** “The Kindness of Strangers” is a three-part investigative series by Barbara Peters Smith, age-beat reporter for the Sarasota Herald-Tribune exposing tragic gaps in Florida’s system of senior guardianships (called conservatorships in other states). The misuse of court proceedings to extract elders’ right to make decisions on their own behalf—often without the person or legal representation for him or her in court—has long been an issue underlying elder abuse concerns, especially of the financial kind. Peters Smith, according to a project blurb about the series, “read hundreds of case files, interviewing elder law attorneys, judges, guardians, and wards [of the state] and their families.” Many seniors are profiled alone with her factual reporting.
In July 2013, Peters Smith wrote about a guardianship case involving former Manatee County judge Claflin Garst Jr., and his wife’s frustrations dealing with the system, which prompted dozens of calls and e-mails from people who also felt shut out by the state’s guardianship system. Last May, she attended the World Congress on Adult Guardianship in Arlington, Va., “and learned that the practice of making elders who lack capacity wards of the state — without first exploring alternatives — is drawing attention as a civil rights issue.”
She dug in to find a paucity of state or federal data on where and how often questionable cases pass through the courts. These cases sometimes do so routinely and in a few minutes, perhaps on the word of a relative or “friend” exerting undue influence, wishing—well-intended or not—to take control of a family elder’s finances and property.
Peters Smith’s series, which ran Dec. 6-8, began with ”Elder Guardianship: A Well-Oiled Machine,” opening Part 1 with the lede, “Marie Winkelman, 89, had her rights removed a year ago at the request of her stepson-in-law, and is bewildered by the idea that she no longer has access to her own finances. She has hired two attorneys in the fight to have her rights restored, and yet the case drags on with little end in sight.” That installment’s sidebar focuses on legal and community advocates against guardianship abuse in “Railing Against Injustice, One Case at a Time.”
For Part 2, headlined “Elder Guardianship: Between a Rock and a Hard Place,” Peters Smith found that under Florida law (echoes in other states), when an elder becomes incapacitated and there’s a dispute among family members, courts will appoint a professional guardian to control their affairs—and their accounts—with little monitoring to ensure that the chosen agent has the senior’s best interests at heart.
Part 3 is about Linda-Kaye Bous, who “insists she does not belong in the assisted-living facility for dementia patients where her guardian has placed her, yet she does not have the right to go home.”
Because data is so little available, Peters Smith notes in the series blurb, she developed the story as “an old-fashioned, lone ranger project – with the help and encouragement of my editor Victor Hull.” She continued, “It was one of those stories where I kept plugging away in my spare time, until we finally felt solid enough to go with it. With no real data, I had to have a true preponderance of ‘anecdotal’ evidence.”
She added, “The vindication – although a sad one – is that for the last two days I’ve been hearing from so many people who say they are in similar situations. And Florida is one of the ‘good’ states!’”
*** “Aging Panel Looks into Debit Card Scams,” by gen-beat columnist Herbert Weiss of Rhode Island’s Pawtucket Times, provides a valuable report on how crooks are defrauding seniors, as discussed by witnesses at last month’s U.S. Special Committee on Aging hearing about financial elder abuse. The session, held Nov. 19, was the third in a series of investigations the panel has undertaken on phone scams affecting the nation’s elders.
In testimony, executives from prepaid-card spoke on their efforts to combat scams using their products. Weiss, noted, “Two debit card companies – Green Dot and InComm- told members of the Senate Aging panel of the decision to drop products favored by fraudsters, even though the products had legitimate uses. Although the third company, Blackhawk, did not drop products, it tightened up its security measures on its similar reloadable debit card product.”
Gen-beat reporters can see a video and download written witness testimony at the Senate Special Committee on Aging website.
Helpful Hint: This is a basic site to monitor regularly for what Congress is hearing on our topic.
Weiss explained, “Last year, the Senate Aging panel took a look at Jamaican lottery schemes, which the Federal Trade Commission found resulted in an estimated $300 million in losses for victims in 2011. Following this hearing, another hearing examined the rise of grandparent scams in which a fraudster takes on the role of a grandchild or law enforcement officer to trick seniors into sending money to get their grandchildren out of jail. In both incidences, scammers routinely instructed seniors to send them money via reloadable prepaid debit cards.”
*** The Latest in the NPR Series on Hospice is “Too Little, Too Late For Many New Yorkers Seeking Hospice” (Dec. 17). The report, by Fred Mogul, is one of several on end-of-life care done in collaboration with WNYC and Kaiser Health News. But readers can link to all 14 of NPR’s reports on the subject, eight of them in 2014, on their “Hospice” website.
*** The Washington Post’s “Consumer Guide to Hospice,” by Dan Keating and Shelly Tan (Oct. 26) is a useful tool for reporters, as well as the public. Stressing. “Hospices vary widely in ways that can affect patient care,” the guide says that the WaPo crew “gathered data largely from government sources on more than 3,000 hospices that participate in Medicare, which pays for the vast majority of hospice care in this country.”
The online resource enables users to click on any state or hospice to see information about agencies around the country, including, among other things:
- The hospice’s age
- Its size
- Its accreditation
- What it spends on nursing per patient
- Whether the operation is for-profit or nonprofit
- Whether it has provided at least some patients with “crisis care,” meaning either continuous nursing care or general inpatient services.
- What percentages of patients are discharged from the hospice before dying.
Kudos to Keating, Tan and company for creating this great resource.
3. FISCAL REFORM SCHOOL
“Cromnibus, Congress’ Bipartisan Funding Beast Giveth to Elders, and Taketh Away”
***Washington Giveth . . .: The $1.1 trillion “Cromnibus” spending bill President Obama says he will sign contains good news, bad news and what else is new for our aging world. Omnibus budget bills are cornucopias for some and black holes for others. Critics of the legislation have dubbed this year’s version of “bipartisanship,” Cromnibus, this C.R. for continuing resolution, plus omnibus, a huge legislative maw consuming all in its path. The appropriately awful locution kind of sounds like Crominus, the cartoon crocodile king garbed in golden armor.
Omnibus spending bills became a common tool on Capitol Hill every fall since about the mid-1980s, as a way for Congress to complete its fiscal business even when the 12 subcommittees of the House Appropriations Committee can’t decide what to fund or not. Members of Congress and the lobbyists who buy or influence them furiously work into the wee, small hours to get their pet projects velcroed in the bill when no one is really looking. So that’s how–even after Congress eliminated “earmarks” a few years ago, those pet projects that may fund a bridge to nowhere, or maybe a truly needed rural health clinic–lots of pork still gets passed out as appropriations largess at Washington holiday time.
Elder Just Act; One small piece of excellent news is that the bill included first-time full funding for the Elder Justice Act (EJA). Intended to fund innovative projects and research toward fighting against elder abuse, the bill was wrapped into the Affordable Care Act five years ago—but never got the money appropriated to get it off the ground until now. That was thanks to no real congressional support and limpid interest from the White House, which didn’t seem to want to sweat small stuff, like old people getting slapped around. (In some years the President’s annual budget request to Congress included zero funding for the EJA.)
Credit for creating the EJA over a decade ago goes largely to DC good-guy Robert “Bob” Blancato, a Capitol Hill mover-shaker, who ran the 1995 White House Conference on Aging and who, among many things, heads the bipartisan Elder Justice Coalition.
Blancato explained in a release that in EJA, funded in the Department of Health and Human Services appropriation (see page 82), about $4 million will “provide competitive grants to states to test and evaluate innovative approaches to preventing and responding to elder abuse.”
“In addition, the omnibus bill also dramatically increases funding for the Crime Victims Fund in the Department of Justice appropriation,” which should result in more funding for victim-assistance, including those involving elder abuse, according to the Coalition,” says the Coalition’s release.
Reporters can follow-up with Bob Blancato at 202-789-0470; e-mail: bob@elderjusticecoalition.com.
*** . . . And Washington (and Its Press Corps) Taketh Away: Pulitzer Prize winning economics reporter (formerly of the NY Times) and author David Cay Johnston fired off a stinging rebuke about DC press-corps reporting on the controversial Cromnibus budget bill. In a post on a leading list serve of social-insurance experts last week, he remarked (quoted here with his permission), “Journalists who write opaquely exacerbate the problem of the public not understanding old-age income.”
In particular, Johnston criticized a report by Rebecca Shabad of the Capitol Hill newspaper The Hill, who “described the Cromnibus provisions that reduces guaranteed pension benefits for retirees in multi-employer plans, some of which are short of funds because Congress eased the rules on contributions and management.”
This may seem like nitpicking to some, but, among retirement-security advocates, the Pension Rights Center’s head Karen Friedman said as the provision headed for passage that she was “outraged that Congress, in a last-minute, behind–closed-doors deal, is about to pass a 161-page piece of legislation that will allow trustees in financially-troubled multiemployer plans to cut the pensions of hundreds of thousands of retirees and widows.”
Johnston quotes The Hill’s Shabad writing that the pension provision “would allow beneficiaries of struggling plans to adjust their benefits in an effort to save struggling funds without a federal bailout. ‘This bill gets a lot of good things done for the American people,’ Rep. Tom Cole (R-Okla.) said. ‘This pension deal is a huge, huge victory for the American people and American taxpayer.’”
Johnston continues, “Politicians like Cole will frame cutting Social Security and Medicare benefits as a victory for taxpayers because they engage in one-sided accounting instead of double entry top track both sides of the equation. Journalists like Shabad will write about it in opaque language that discourages understanding.”
He warns, “We need to be on the watch for both so that people get rounded, quality information in plain English.”
*** Johnston also contributed the foreword to the book, Social Security Works! by Nancy J. Altman and Eric R. Kingson. It will be out Jan. 21, 2015, but e-versions and advance reading copies are available to journalists now. The book is fully titled Social Security Works! Why Social Security Isn’t Going Broke and How Expanding It Will Help Us All. Johnston states, “Altman and Kingson cut through the fog of calculated confusion and outright lies abut Social Security.”
Two of the leading progressive authorities on our national pension system, Kingson, long a professor at Syracuse University, and Altman, who has been considered a candidate to run the Social Security Administration (SSA), both staffed President Reagan’s 1982 National Commission on Social Security Reform chaired by Alan Greenspan. Six years ago the pair co-founded the advocacy group, Social Security Works and helped forge together the Strengthening Social Security Coalition, which now includes over 300 member organizations.
The book’s message that now is the time for strengthening, not weakening the only financial security most Americans will have in old age took on an unexpected note of urgency for GBO’s editor recently. A very smart and thoughtful Gen Xer I know, told me how worried he is that the Social Security Administration’s latest calculation for him estimates that at retirement he’ll earn benefits of around $1,200 per month. That, he said, will be about 20-25% of his post-retirement needs. Although that percentage sounds low (and Social Security usually does increase with more working years), it’s true that the median income-replacement rate of one’s pre-retirement income is eroding and could by some estimates dip to one-third or less of people’s late-career earning levels, so my friend has a right to worry.
What struck me though was that rather than advocating for strengthen Social Security, this Gen Xer echoed the conventional wisdom—calling the very existence of the program he’ll need into question. “Do the math,” he said. And, “Everybody knows Social Security is a Ponzi scheme.” He was knowledgeable enough to quote percentages of younger people who “don’t believe the program will be there” for their old age.” That statistical measure of fear is roughly accurate, but badly missed the point. It reflects the anti-entitlement view conservatives and Wall Street have so adeptly sold through mainstream media for over 30 years.
It’s also true, as Kingson and Altman show, that people of all ages continue in poll after poll to support the program and say that do not want it cut to reduce the federal debt. In fact, a wide majority favor strengthening the program for economically vulnerable, a category that might well include them–but for fortune.
The good news is that the two authors actually “do the math” answering canards, such as frequent claims that the system is somehow on it’s way to bankruptcy. It now holds $2.8 trillion in the Social Security Trust Fund and growing, thus covering the next 20 years of obligations.
Ponzi scheme? If Bernie Madoff had been able to exercise the power to tax and had adhered to strict rules, such as those protecting Social Security’s trust fund, he wouldn’t be in jail today. (He’d also be a government.) Not only is Social Security’s income stream steady, backed by the full faith and credit of the United States—credit that the rest of the world continues to buy into—but it is also governed by a program-specific tax protected by law.
Fortunately, my younger friend, who is brilliant in his field and rightly concerned about his retirement future, will be getting a gift from me soon. Social Security Works! Not only does the math, it enumerates the myths surrounding the program’s financing in a chapter titled “The Conventional ‘Wisdom’ Is Just Plain Wrong.”
Mind you, the book is still wonky, but it’s written clearly enough for those concerned with the issues to frame questions about frequent claims made on both conservative and progressive sides of the debate. Too often and for too long business and political reporters have spouted on the issue strictly in terms of how much to cut from entitlement programs to “save” them for “our children and grandchildren.” Social Security Works! should help reframe this debate more honestly, in terms of where the real crisis in retirement is looming–how secure we want ourselves and our neighbors to be as, like my Gen X friend, we build on our American dreams.
For an advance copy of Social Security Works! either in e-book format or a hard copy, contact Julie McCarroll at the New Press, 212.564.4406, jmccarroll@thenewpress.com.
4. EYES ON THE PRIZE
***The Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ) Set a Feb. 6 Deadline, for entering its national Sigma Delta Chi Awards. There’s an almost exhaustive list of categories across all media, and submissions of work done in 2014 can come from any U.S. media outlet. For a complete breakdown of rules, categories, past winners and online application process, visit the SPJ website. Winners will be notified in May 2015, and a banquet recognizing the honorees will be in June 2015, at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. Those with questions can contact Awards Coordinator Abbi Martzall at awards@spj.org or 317.920.4791 with any questions. The entry fee is $60 for members per submission and $85 for nonmembers. So join, already.
Also, SPJ’s Mark of Excellent Awards for journalism students has an entry deadline of Jan. 23.
*** The Association of Health Care Journalists (AHCJ) Entry Deadline for the 2014 Awards for Excellence in Health Care Journalism [http://healthjournalism.org/awards] is Jan. 16. The awards recognize the best health reporting in print, broadcast and online media across 12 categories. AHCH emphasizes, “The contest was created by journalists for journalists and is not influenced or funded by commercial or special-interest groups.” Entries can include a wide range of health coverage, such as public health, consumer health, medical research, the business of health care, health care policy and health ethics.
First-place winners earn $500 and a framed certificate. They also receive complimentary lodging for two nights and registration for the annual conference, April 23-26, in Silicon Valley, at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Santa Clara, Calif.
At the conference website, be sure to check the “Fellowships” section. There are nine different fellowships, some for reporters from specific states, and others for rural reporters, journalism students or instructors and ethnic media journalists. Typical Fellowship awards include the “conference registration fee, one year’s membership in AHCJ (new or extended), up to four nights in conference hotel (Wed.-Sat.) and up to $400 in travel (will vary depending on your location).”
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