GBO NEWS: Reporting Fellowship Deadlines; GOP’s Disability Attack; & More
GENERATIONS BEAT ONLINE NEWS
E-News of the Journalists Network on Generations
January 14, 2015 — Volume 15, Number 1
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. You can subscribe to GBONews.org at no charge simply by sending a request to Paul with your name, address, phone number and editorial affiliation or note that you freelance. You’ll receive the table of contents as e-mail, just click through to the full issue at www.gbonews.org.
IN THIS ISSUE: Starting Our 22nd Year. We’re Spry—I Hate Spry!
1. EYES ON THE PRIZE: $10,000 Health Care Print Journalism Awards Deadline Feb 18; *** SPJ’s Sigma Delta Chi Awards Deadline, Feb. 6; *** AHCJ’s Application Deadline is March 2 for Fellowships
2. CALENDAR: 2015 White House Conference on Aging (WHCOA) Announced 5 Regional Preconference Events
3. FISCAL REFORM SCHOOL: GOP’s Salvo at Social Security & Disability
4. THE STORYBOARD: “When a Patient’s Death is Broadcast Without Permission,” by Charles Ornstein, Pro Publica; *** “The Liberation of Growing Old,” by author Anne Karpf, New York Times; *** “5 Biggest Threats To Social Security From New Republican Congress,” by Eric Laursen, Alternet; *** My Civil Rights Year—Selma, Louisiana and Mrs. Caulfield’s Butterbeans, by Paul Kleyman, New America Media; *** “‘Kill the Pain, Not the Patient’–Catholicism’s Message on Palliative Care,” by Vivian Zalvidea Araullo, INQUIRER.net, *** “Growing Awareness of End-of-Life Care Among Nigerian Immigrants,” by Julian Do, Immigrants Magazine Online
1. EYES ON THE PRIZE
*** $10,000 Health Care Print Journalism Awards Deadline Feb 18: Yes, print! Remember print? The National Institute for Health Care Management (NIHCM) will present $10K each to winners in two categories for a health care article or series from a general circulation publication, and from a trade pub. It’s the 21st Annual NIHCM Foundation Health Care Print Journalism Awards.
Submitted articles must have been originally have been published during the calendar year 2014, and should be relevant to the financing and delivery of health care and/or the impact of health care policy. NIHCM is accepting entries from both staff reporters/editors, as well as freelance writers. “Online articles will be accepted if produced and disseminated originally on the web in affiliation with a general circulation or trade publication.”
The selection panel is very distinguished, among them, John Iglehart, Founding Editor, Health Affairs; Alan Murray, Editor, Fortune; and Fred Schulte, Senior Reporter, Center for Public Integrity.
There’s no entry fee. But check out the application and rules website and the site they set up for “Frequently Asked Questions.”
The top 2014 winners were a Milwaukee Journal team for “Deadly Delays,” on systemic delays in the processing of infant screenings for rare diseases, and Joe Carlson of Modern Healthcare, for digging into inconsistencies between hospital costs and patient outcomes related to a common cardiac procedure, percutaneous coronary intervention.
The NIHCM judges also gave an Honorable Mention to he Colorado Springs Gazette’s Dave Philipps (reporter) and Michael Ciaglo (photographer) for – “Other Than Honorable,” breaking what would become a national story on how the military discharges soldiers “for misconduct that may be related to war injuries like post-traumatic stress disorder, often severing their veteran’s benefits in the process.”
***SPJ’s Sigma Delta Chi Awards Deadline, Feb. 6: The Society of Professional Journalists is accepting submissions for its 2014 awards honoring “the best in professional journalism.” Work must have been published or broadcasted during 2014. “The contest is open to any U.S. media outlet or international SPJ members. Many categories have multiple divisions based on market size or circulation, says the SPJ awards website. It adds, “The contest is open to any work published or broadcast by U.S. media outlets or international SPJ members. — Every entry must be accompanied by a cover letter. — If not originally published or broadcast in English, entries must include an English transcript or English subtitles.” The per entry fee is $60 for SPJ members and a stiff $100 for nonmembers. There a quite few award categories, so check them out on the site. SPJ will announce the winners on April 24, and will present them at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., June 26.
Enter online at awards.spj.org. Contact Awards Coordinator Abbi Martzall at awards@spj.org or at 317.927.4791.
*** AHCJ’s Application Deadline is March 2 for Fellowships to attend their national conference. AHCJ (Association of Health Care Journalists) is the principal group for reporters on health issues in the United States. This year’s meeting is set for 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).”
The conference will include sessions on the latest aging research and one on the challenges of covering end-of-life care. It will feature Katy Butler, author of the 2013 bestseller Knocking on Heaven’s Door; Stanford University palliative care expert, V.J. Periyakoil, MD (to present with one of her patients); and veteran hospice nurse, G. Jay Westbrook. Moderating the session will be GBONews.org Editor Paul Kleyman.
2. CALENDAR
The 2015 White House Conference on Aging (WHCOA), the once-a-decade meeting of the minds (one hopes) on policy issues in aging, will happen later this year in Washington, D.C. But the issues are so expansive, the WHCOA office holds a series of preconference mini-sessions for policymakers, experts and advocates to meet and develop recommendations for the main event. This week WHCOA Executive Direct Nora Super announced a series of regional forums. (And no, Super doesn’t wear a cape and “S” on her outfits–we’re…ah..,sure.)
The regional meetings will be in: Tampa, Fla., Feb. 19; Phoenix, Ariz., March 31; Seattle, Wash., April 9; Cleveland, Ohio, April 27; and Boston, Mass., May 28. The date for the WHCOA hasn’t been announced, yet.
The event, while organized by the White House, actually has bipartisan congressional participation and is supposed to yield a document with policy recommendations for the coming 10 years that the White House is obligated to submit to Congress. The forums are being cosponsored by AARP and co-planned with the Leadership Council of Aging Organizations (LCAO), a coalition of more than 70 of the nation’s leading organizations serving older Americans. Participation is by invitation, but the events will be webcast to various locations. GBONews.org will be reporting on media access in later issues.
The 2015 WHCOA will focus on four areas: “ensuring retirement security; promoting healthy aging; providing long-term services and supports; and protecting older Americans from financial exploitation, abuse and neglect. Additional information on Conference activities can be found at whitehouseconferenceonaging.gov.
3. FISCAL REFORM SCHOOL—GOP’s Salvo at Social Security & Disability
“Well, that didn’t take long,” wrote Michael Hiltzik in his Los Angeles Times, business column (Jan. 7). In case you missed it–as did most national media–the GOP’s House leadership buried an IED along the Social Security road in its 36-page set of new rules for the 114th Congress. Except for the LAT, AP and a smattering of others, most media entries about it in a Google search are blogs.
Hiltzik, Pulitzer Prize winner and author of The New Deal: A Modern History (Simon & Schuster), stressed, “The rule hampers an otherwise routine reallocation of Social Security payroll tax income from the old-age program to the disability program. Such a reallocation, in either direction, has taken place 11 times since 1968, [http://tinyurl.com/oerefv9] according to Kathy Ruffing of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.” That includes four times while Ronald Reagan was in the White House.
He continues, “But it’s especially urgent now, because the disability program’s trust fund is expected to run dry as early as next year. At that point, disability benefits for 11 million beneficiaries would have to be cut 20 percent. Reallocating the income, however, would keep both the old-age and disability programs solvent until at least 2033, giving Congress plenty of time to assess the programs’ needs and work out a long-term fix.”
That is, arcanely wonky as this rule change may seem, it suggests that the Republican congressional strategy will involve a divide-and-conquer strategy pitting 43 million people benefiting from the Old Age & Survivors Insurance (OASI) program—mostly seniors–versus the 11 million people receiving Disability Insurance (DI) —and those 54 million Social Security beneficiaries against the remaining 270 million Americans.
There’s also an underlying racial issue. You see, the larger OASI program is not a great GOP target–it’s working well and is considered sacrosanct by most voters, as well as serving an overwhelmingly white older population. In fact, the new GOP rule would do little under House limits. For instance, it would still allow the transfer of enough funds from the OASI program to the separate DI fund that would delay the 20 percent depletion by one year.
As it happens, though, DI serves higher percentages of ethnic groups, especially pre-retirees in the 50-64 age range. In the wake of the Great Recession, especially, many of them found few other sources of basic income—something many media outlets fail to mention. That helped to spike the DI applications precipitating the current crisis–and leaving a million applicants awaiting adjudication of their claims. Despite media impressions, DI benefits are notoriously hard to come by.
One expert put it, the DI program is “ripe for demagoguing,” largely because the definition of “disability” is mushy, there’s no clear consensus exists on how to proceed. What the GOP has done in this case, though, is to play the programs (and constituents) off against one another by declaring, in effect, “Don’t lay a hand on Social Security, you lousy Democrats—to prop up that rotten disability program!”
Even so, Social Security is an ever-present treasure that has prompted both George W. Bush and Barack Obama to try mapping out a pathway to its coffers for various political reasons.
Dylan Scott of Talking Points Memo explained the new rule: “The largely overlooked change puts a new restriction on the routine transfer of tax revenues between the traditional Social Security retirement trust fund and the Social Security disability program.” He explains that the Social Security trustees estimated last year “that the disability insurance program would run short of money to pay all benefits some time in late 2016. Without a new reallocation, disability insurance beneficiaries could face up to 20 percent cuts in their Social Security payments in late 2016 — a chit that would be of use to Republicans pushing for conservative entitlement reforms.” The House GOP’s rule change (uniformly rejected by Democrats) “would still allow for a reallocation from the retirement fund to shore up the disability fund — but only if an accompanying proposal ‘improves the overall financial health of the combined Social Security Trust Funds.’” While that language is vague, the Republican aim is to force the funds transfer to be balanced by new revenues or benefit cuts.
Associated Press correspondent Stephen Ohlemacher wrote that Rep. Tom Reed, R-N.Y., “said he sponsored the provision in an effort to force Congress to find a long-term solution to the disability program’s financial problems.”
Ohlemacher reported that the “average monthly payment for a disabled worker is $1,146, or a little less than $14,000 a year.”
The LA Times’ Hiltzik observed, “The rule change reflects the burgeoning demonization of disability recipients, a trend we’ve reported on in the past it’s been fomented by conservative Republicans and abetted by sloppy reporting by institutions such as NPR and “60 Minutes”.
Barriers to Getting Disability Insurance
Both media establishments (including a disappointing report on the usually terrific “This American Life” that was criticized in a letter signed by a bipartisan group of former U.S. Commissioners of Social Security) focused on greedy lawyers exploiting a loophole in the law to extract benefits for people who may or may not be deserving of them.
Hiltzik explains, “Disability recipients are easily caricatured as malingering layabouts by politicians, academics and journalists too lazy to do their homework. They’ll say disability benefits are easy to obtain, so lavish they discourage work, and convenient substitutes for welfare payments. None of that is true.”
The barriers for getting Social Security’s disability benefits are so strict, he noted, just over a quarter of applicants are approved at first with an another 13% winning benefits on appeal. “All in all, only 41% of all applicants end up with checks,” Hiltzik wrote.
“To be eligible,” he wrote, “you must have worked at least one-fourth of your adult life (typically from age 22 on), and been employed in at least five of the previous 10 years. Children qualify under Supplemental Security Income, and workers younger than 31 have to show employment in half the years since they turned 22.” Applicants have to be too impaired to earn the modest benefit amount on the their own.
As if to confirm speculation about conservative salivating over the change, Heritage Foundation’s Romina Boccia defended the GOP House rule, stating, “This change sets the stage for comprehensive Social Security reform in the 114th Congress.” Commenting on her post, headlined, [http://tinyurl.com/mwbaatk] “The House Just Made It Harder for Politicians to Steal From Social Security Retirement Fund,”
Huffington Post blogger Richard Escow observed, [http://tinyurl.com/odfcch9] “See what they did there, before we’ve even read the text? They changed the subject from ‘disabled Americans’ to ‘politicians.’ (People hate ‘politicians,’ right?) But the money wouldn’t go to ‘politicians,’ who have generous retirement and disability plans. It would go to the ‘disabled.’ And it wouldn’t be ‘stolen. It would be borrowed – from the same payroll tax which funds retirement benefits.”
For those who want to tune up on various views of the issue—before American media decide it’s worthy of notice—Escow’s blog included these additional “well-informed analyses” by:
*Nancy Altman and Eric Kingson
4. THE STORYBOARD
Don’t have enough brain food for your gray matter? Here’s selection of recent media fare on eldering, if not aging, for your edification.
*** “When a Patient’s Death is Broadcast Without Permission,” by Charles Ornstein, senior reporter at Pro Publica and published jointly with the New York Times website. It ran on their site and on the New York Times website, as well as in the Sunday, Jan. 4, NYT Metropolitan section.
Ornstein noted in an e-mail that the story focuses on a family whose loved one was filmed without their consent by ABC-TV’s NY Med. “Even though his face was blurred out in the episode, the family recognized him and so did a family friend. In addition, the doctor’s voice was being taped as he told the family that their relative had died,” he said. He added, “The story brings up so many issues: The right to privacy vs. the First Amendment. It also raises an important question about whether there is a different legal vs. ethical standard. The family has sued the hospital and the TV show, but an appellate court recently dismissed the case. The family is pressing on.
The man’s son, Ken Chanko, wrote in a complaint to the hospital, “I had to unnecessarily relive my father’s death at your hospital a second time, while knowing that the public at large was able to — and continues to be able to — watch my father’s passing, for the purposes of what can only be described as drive-by voyeuristic ‘entertainment.'”
*** “The Liberation of Growing Old,” by London-based sociologist Anne Karpf, asks, “Why do we have such punitive attitudes toward old people?” Also published in the Jan. 4 New York Times (Sunday Review section), the piece is among the more incisive discussions GBONews’ editor has seen in some time on the ageism permeating our culture.
She writes, “Today, the language used to describe the changing age composition of the population is little short of apocalyptic. We’re told that the ‘graying of America’ is an ‘agequake’ or a ‘demographic time bomb.’ Older people are likely to be seen as a burden and a drain on resources, rather than a resource in themselves.”
Karpf, author of a new book, How to Age (Picador/St. Martin’s Press), continues, “But the social bias is real, too. When a large sample of Facebook groups created by 20- to 29-year-olds was examined by a team based at the Yale School of Public Health, three-quarters of the groups were found to denigrate old people. More than a third advocated banning old people from public activities like shopping.” She adds ageism “tells us that age is our defining characteristic and that, as midnight strikes on a milestone birthday, we will become nothing but old — emptied of our passions, abilities and experience, infused instead with frailty and decline.”
Karpf cites another study by noted psychologist Ellen Langer and Yale epidemiologist Becca Levy, who compared memories of young and older Chinese and Americans. They “found that the older Chinese people, who, it was hypothesized, were exposed to less ageism than their American counterparts, performed memory tests more like their younger compatriots. Among the Americans, on the other hand, there were significant memory differences between the old and young, suggesting that our cultural belief that age necessitates waning powers may well be a matter of self-fulfilling prophesy.
She concludes that “the emerging age-acceptance movement . . .recognizes that one can remain vital and present, engaged and curious, indeed continue to grow, until one’s dying breath. Then we need only echo the wish of the British psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott: ‘May I be alive when I die.’”
Those interested in requesting a copy of Karpf’s How to Age paperback can contact
Cassie Mandel at 646-307-5633; cassie.mandel@picadorusa.com.
*** 5 Biggest Threats To Social Security From New Republican Congress, by Alternet blogger Eric Laursen, author of The People’s Pension: [http://tinyurl.com/9peovhh] The Struggle to Defend Social Security Since Reagan (AK Press, 2012) concisely reflects on challenges to the system from both GOP and centrist Democratic sides.
*** My Civil Rights Year—Selma, Louisiana and Mrs. Caulfield’s Butterbeans, New America Media, by GBONews Editor Paul Kleyman. What’s it about? I’d say about 50 years. Come along for a bumpy Louisiana rise with me.
*** Two recent articles on palliative for older Filipino and Nigerian immigrants in the U.S. ran as the most recent ethnic media pieces in a New America Media (NAM)initiative sponsored by the California Health Care Foundation. Posted on NAM’s special website, Palliative and Hospice Care, these articles offer a fascinating glimpse late-life challenges facing ethnic communities:
“ ‘Kill the Pain, Not the Patient’–Catholicism’s Message on Palliative Care,” by Vivian Zalvidea Araullo, originated on INQUIRER.net, the top international Filipino website, and also appeared on NAM. “Despite misunderstandings about Catholic teachings, Filipino elders are learning that it’s okay to allow palliative or hospice care “kill the pain, not the patient.”
And “Growing Awareness of End-of-Life Care Among Nigerian Immigrants,” by Julian Do appeared in Immigrants Magazine Online and NAM. “Nigerian Americans are learning at life’s end, U.S. medicine has limits, and palliative care may be best for very ill seniors.”
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