GBO NEWS: When You’ll Die–The U.S. Inequality Game; Robots, Alzheimer’s & More
GENERATIONS BEAT ONLINE NEWS
E-News of the Journalists Network on Generations
Dec. 15, 2015 — Volume 15, 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. 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: For you: an Election-Campaign Holiday.
1. WHEN YOU WILL DIE–THE ULTIMATE U.S. INEQUALITY GAME: *** End Game: How Inequality Shapes Our Final Years by Corey Abramson; *** NYT’s “New Old Age” on Life Expectancy Gap by Income.
2. GOOD SOURCES: ***When Generation Bust Was Booming: U.S. Census Bureau on Gen X and the Millennials
3. THE STORYBOARD I: NAM’s Elders Newsbeat Site Approaching 700 Stories
4. EYES ON THE PRIZE: SPJ NorCal Awards on Caregiving Robots, Alzheimer’s and Medical Crowdsourcing
5. THE STORYBOARD II: *** “Imagine a Medicare ‘Part Q’ for Quality at the End of Life,” by Katy Butler, New York Times; *** “Could Dim View on Aging Raise Your Alzheimer’s Risk?” by Alan Mozes, HealthDay Reporter; *** “Coping with the High Cost of Dementia,” by Donna Rosato, Money Magazine (3-part series). *** “New Research Exposes Big Problem With Long-Term Care Insurance,” by Richard Eisenberg, Next Avenue; *** “Five Myths About Baby Boomers,” by Sally Abrahms, Washington Post
6. GEN BEATLES NEWS: *** Nonprofit Media Maven Deane Beebe moves to Medicare Rights Center; ***Age-Beat Columnist Herb Weiss Receives Edible Honor (Hint: It’s to Die For.)
1. WHEN YOU’LL DIE–THE ULTIMATE U.S. INEQUALITY GAME
End Game: How Inequality Shapes Our Final Years by Corey Abramson (Harvard University Press) isn’t about terrorism or other obsessions of the 24-hour news cycle. It’s about the ultimate issue of life and death in America: When you and yours will die and in what condition you’ll be at the time depends on who you are — where you live, your ethnicity, your gender, your educational level and where the American way of life has elevated or stalled your progress through the years. Black Live Matter advocates—pay more attention: The cause goes much more deeply than the ugliness of police shootings (important as they are). Protesting those bullets are also a start for the discussion about the hastened deaths U.S. inequality imposes on tens of millions.
Abramson, a sociologist at the University of Arizona, headed a six-year study resulting in both statistical analyses and portraits of seniors from diverse backgrounds. They reveal aging in the United States as a social process stratified by disparities in wealth, access to health care, neighborhood conditions and networks of friends and family shape how different people understand and adapt to the challenges of old age.
GBONews readers can get an overview of Abramson’s book in his Atlantic article published last April 20, titled, “Unequal Until the End”.
He wrote, “Some assert that inequality is less of an issue in later life. The argument goes like this: While inequalities shape much of our lives—including where we are born, the schools we go to, and the jobs we get—the physical challenges of aging and the effects of programs such as Social Security and Medicare mean we play life’s end game on a relatively level playing field. Panglossian optimists take this a step further by arguing that we all have at least a nominal chance to ‘age successfully’ if we simply adopt a ‘positive mindset and make good choices.’ The problem with this common portrayal is, it obscures more than it reveals.”
Abramson, for example, cites the finding of the prestigious MacArthur Foundation Network on an Aging Society showing in Health Affairs (August 2012) that in 2008, life expectancies were 14.2 years more for white men who had 16 or more years of schooling than for black men with high school or less education. The gaps was a 10.3-year between highly educated white women and black women with 12 year or less in school. (Abramson doesn’t mention here that the span was also about 10 year of life between white women with high versus low educational levels.)
He writes, “The wealthiest people in my study had aged in or retired to communities with voluminous senior programs, while many of the poor became increasingly isolated as they struggled with piecemeal social services.”
Abramson credits Social Security and Medicare as helpful but unable alone to relieve deep structural inequalities across American’s lived experiences. He writes, “We must acknowledge the uncomfortable reality that decades of unequal circumstances are etched in our bodies and cannot be easily wiped away at the end of life. Long-term solutions require a deeper dialogue about what we are willing to do about inequality at all life stages …. Until we address the unequal circumstances Americans face over the course of their lives, the specter of inequality will continue to haunt our final years.”
Journalists can request a press review copy from: Publicity Department, Harvard University Press, 79 Garden St., Cambridge, MA 02138; phone (617) 496-1340;
e-mail publicity_hup@harvard.edu.
*** “Income Inequality Grows With Age and Shapes Later Years,” by Paula Span in her New York Times “New Old Age” column (Oct. 13) adds another dimension to Corey Abramson’s book in the context of other recent findings from the National Academies of Science, Engineering & Medicine. The Growing Gap in Life Expectancy by Income: Implications for Federal Programs and Policy Responses (2015) is a congressionally mandated report.
2. GOOD SOURCES
*** GENERATION BUST WAS BOOMING: Generation X (plus a lot of late-blooming Boomers) were busily propagating their progeny from 1982-2000: Hence the U.S. Census Bureau reports, “Millennials Outnumber Baby Boomers and Are Far More Diverse” (June 25). Numbering 83.1 million, Millennials “represent more than one-quarter of the nation’s population.” The report goes on, “Overall, Millennials are more diverse than the generations that preceded them, with 44.2 percent being part of a minority race or ethnic group (that is, a group other than non-Hispanic, single-race white).” The document examines age, sex, race and Hispanic origin nationally, as well as in all states and counties, between April 1, 2010, and July 1, 2014.
The report includes summary bullet points on the 65-plus population (46.2 million in 2014 and rising), as well as overall demographic stats for all ages on Hispanics, blacks, Asians, American Indians and Alaska Natives, Native Hawaiians and Other Pacific Islanders, and non-Hispanic whites, too.
3. THE STORYBOARD I
NAM’S ELDERS NEWSBEAT 700 STORIES AND COUNTING
As 2015 wends its last lap toward a New Year and the entertaining, not to mention frightening, election season, this editor is rounding off another editorial milestone since inaugurating the Ethnic Elders Newsbeat with colleagues at New America Media (NAM) seven years ago. Sometime in the next couple of weeks we will post the 700th article on NAM’s Elders website, many of them linking to stories we’ve helped initially in such languages as Spanish, Korean, Chinese and Vietnamese.
Many of those stories stem from NAM’s nonprofit journalism fellowship programs on a range of topic areas, such as palliative and hospice care or the impact of gentrification on urban elders. Over 300 of the pieces to date derived from the Journalists in Aging Fellows Program, which NAM created in collaboration with the Gerontological Society of America, in cooperation with GBONews’ parent organization, the Journalists Network on Generations. Now in its sixth year, this fellowship program alone has involved 102 reporters from both ethnic and mainstream news outlets nationwide. Overall, NAM’s Elders newsbeat has tapped more than 160 journalists for fellowships to write or produce in-depth stories on aging.
Following are some recent pieces from NAM’s Elders website. The first links here go to each reporter’s originating publication followed by the hyperlink to the NAM version.
* “Meeting Spotlights LGBT-Aging Research From HIV to Isolation,” Bay Area Reporter/New America Media , News Report, Matthew S. Bajko, Posted: Dec 08, 2015. Link: http://tinyurl.com/h6ws5sh. Research revealing the needs of LGBT elders was more prominent than ever at the recent Gerontological Society of America meeting in Orlando.
* “Fighting Ageism in the Twitter Era (Getting Old Isn’t All That Bad),”Arizona Republic/New America Media, Commentary, Linda Valdez, Posted: Dec 04, 2015. Link: http://tinyurl.com/hcepore. Experts at a major meeting on aging said tweets reveal extensive ageism in U.S. culture. They explored how to reverse this negativity as boomers grow older.
* “Elder Hunger: New Efforts To Combat Common Malnutrition Among Seniors,” WBUR Common Health/New America Media , News Report, Nell Lake, Posted: Dec 02, 2015 . Link: http://tinyurl.com/o49bcw9. Malnutrition is surprisingly common among U.S. elders, said experts at a recent national conference on aging. Also posted nationally on NPR’s Facebook.
* “Aging Trans People Locked Out of U.S. Health Care System,”Newsweek/New America Media, News Feature, Liana Aghajanian, Posted: Nov 09, 2015. Link:http://tinyurl.com/q73l6rv. Besides Caitlyn Jenner, thousands of transgender elders like Michelle Evans still cope with stigma and discrimination of the health care system.
* And one of our favorites of the year: Part 1 — “Wonton Soup, Bok Choi–Subsidized Comfort Meals New for Ethnic Elders,” Hyphen/New America Media , News Feature, Lisa Wong Macabasco , Posted: Aug 27, 2015. Link: http://tinyurl.com/py8kbhv. How do you say “Meals on Wheels” in Chinese? Ethnic comfort food is the newest trend in home and group meals for increasingly diverse older Americans. And Part 2 — “As Senior Meals Go Ethnic, Health, Funding, Strict Rules on Menu With Bok Choi,”Hyphen/New America Media , Posted: Aug 28, 2015. Link: http://tinyurl.com/n98naua.
4. EYES ON THE PRIZE
Robots, Alzheimer’s and Medical Crowdsourcing were topics of three aging-relevant awards presented last month at the Society of Professional Journalists, Northern California Chapter’s 30th Annual Excellence in Journalism Awards. They included:
***VIDEO JOURNALISM (essay): Jim Gensheimer of the San Jose Mercury News for “A Community Built on Care,” which SPJ’s judges said “illustrated with clarity and sensitivity the challenge of addressing the particular needs of people who are poor and have Alzheimer’s. The piece is unsparing but enormously evocative and offers a respectful view into the relationship between an adult daughter and her mother who are making their way with grace.”
***OUTSTANDING EMERGING JOURNALIST: Angela Johnston of KALW Public Radio, said the judges, “brings journalistic passion to everything she covers. Her stories showed great skill in weaving audio, text and visuals together to communicate compellingly.” The jury especially focused on her piece, “Robots for Humanity,” about how technology is changing the life of a man who suffered a rare stroke.
***JOURNALISM INNOVATION: Also important for health reporting (not just on aging), Lisa Aliferis and Lisa Pickoff-White of KQED-FM won for PriceCheck, “a tool for crowdsourcing information about medical costs. The results are used in news articles, and the wider public can access the database to search for costs in medical care and compare prices. This novel, useful and informative application of crowdsourcing represents great public service journalism,’ said the SPJ judges.
GOT KUDOS? If you know of any honors accrued recently on the generations beat, either locally or nationally (including for you), please drop GBONews [pkleyman@newamericamedia.org] a note with basic details and, if possible, a link.
5. THE STORYBOARD II
*** “Imagine a Medicare ‘Part Q’ for Quality at the End of Life,” [http://tinyurl.com/q3gw6nr] by Katy Butler (Dec. 9), New York Times “Opinionator”: Butler, author of the bestseller, Knocking on Heaven’s Door: The Path to a Better Way of Death (Simon & Schuster, 2014) cites Harvard health policy expert Muriel Gillick, who has criticized Medicare for paying poorly for primary care and supportive services except within hospice. Butler notes, “Small problems become big, and then Medicare covers an unending cycle of expensive emergency room visits, hospital stays, and aggressive Hail Mary treatments that can do more harm than good. As a result, Dr. Gillick writes, Medicare ‘shapes the way we die’ by funneling us toward a high-tech hospital death.”
Butler calls for “an optional new Medicare benefit. It would be called Part Q, for Quality of Life. Only those who seek it out could sign up. Democrats should love it for expanding services. Republicans should love it for expanding freedom of choice without raising costs. Those who don’t like it can leave it alone.”
Once someone would signed up, “a coordinated Part Q primary care team — a concierge medical service for the 99 percent — would take responsibility for all my medical care until my death. Over time, it would help me make the transition smoothly from useful curative approaches to those focused on sustaining my quality of daily life, to ‘comfort care only’ and, I hope, a gentle death at home. Doctors, nurses and home health aides would come to the house for as long as I needed them. I’d get up to two years of hospice benefits, rather than the current arbitrary six months. And I’d save Medicare money.”
GBO’s editor would only amend this to also include the ultra-wealthy 1 percent. That’s because even the very rich usually don’t get quality geriatric care if it isn’t widely available to everyone. Just think of the looming shortage of health care providers predicted for our aging population. In end-of-life or chronic-illness care, the rich think they can buy what they want, but I’ve known very affluent people to find they can’t get a house call from their over-scheduled geriatrician even when an office visit would be difficult, if not risky.
Too often a long-time family physician, trusted at the office or country club, simply never got the right training in geriatric medicine. Bottom line, if 100 percent of us don’t have it, we’re all at risk.
*** “Could Dim View on Aging Raise Your Alzheimer’s Risk?” (Negative stereotypes associated with greater mental decline, study says) by Alan Mozes, HealthDay Reporter (Dec. 7): The respected news service reports on the latest research by Becca R. Levy, PhD, of Yale’s School of Public Health, and colleagues on health impacts of attitudes about aging. In Psychology and Aging (Dec. 7), the researchers report that individuals holding negative beliefs about aging are more likely to have brain changes placing them at greater risk for Alzheimer’s disease.
Mozes wrote, “The investigation compared early attitudes on aging expressed by dementia-free adults to Alzheimer’s-related brain changes nearly 30 years later. ‘What we found is that negative perceptions on aging are definitely significantly related to [Alzheimer’s] disease indicators,’” said Levy, the study’s lead author.
Levy’s speculated in an interview with Mozes that the cause “could be that a pessimistic stance on aging drives up stress,” thus elevating the Alzheimer’s risk. However, Mozes quotes Amy Kelley, MD, of the Brookdale department of geriatrics and palliative medicine at New York’s the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, who said, it’s an “interesting association, but it’s very hard to interpret, because there’s a really wide range of things, besides stress, that could be involved.” Kelley added, “Maybe those with more-negative views don’t bother exercising. Or maybe they eat less well. There could be a myriad of pathways that play a role.”
Levy’s research team initially used data from the Baltimore Longitudinal Study of Aging, begun in 1958, the nation’s longest-running longitudinal studies. Participants underwent annual brain-imaging scans (MRIs) for up to 10 years aimed at pinpointing changes in the size of the hippocampus region of the brain, which is key to memory regulation. Over the decade, Mozes explained, the researchers found people more negatively inclined toward aging had hippocampus shrinkage “in three years as those with more-positive views experienced in nine years.”
*** “Coping with the High Cost of Dementia,” by Donna Rosato, Money Magazine, three-part series (Dec. 2, 8 & 9). The main stories explored challenges in managing the early, middle and final stages of dementia. The series also had three sidebars plus a “Financial Resource Guide For Dementia Care,” which Donato wrote with Alexandra Mondalek.”
*** “New Research Exposes Big Problem With Long-Term Care Insurance,” (Nov. 6) by Richard Eisenberg, Next Avenue (Nov. 6): He reports that although some hope that buying LTCI will protect them from exorbitant long-term care costs (with a private nursing home room now at $91,250, according to Genworth Financial), there is “stunning news” in a new analysis by Center for Retirement Research (CRR) at Boston College. That report found more than a third of people with long-term care policies “at age 65 lapse their coverage before they die, forfeiting all benefits.”
Eisenberg added, “Even worse: many of these people are letting their policies lapse just when they need them, says Anthony Webb, a senior research economist at CRR and one of the co-authors of the study.”
Worse still wrote Eisenberg, “Lapses are common among the cognitively impaired — presumably because they aren’t even aware they haven’t paid the premiums, which caused the policies to fizzle.”
This editor sent the article link to my financial adviser. And there’s my news tip of for personal finance writers. Look more closely at the retirement-finance industry as a leading broker for what is essentially health insurance. It’s understandable that financial counselors find themselves having to bring up LTC as a future risk — a huge wild-card expense. But it is essentially an unacknowledged contradiction of U.S. eldercare that even honest brokers (as opposed to investment companies with a stake in LTCI sales), find themselves having to wade into medical territory based mainly on scary uncontrolled cost projections. The United States remains the only advanced economy to include LTC as little more than an afterthought in its health care system.
Yet, the vast majority of media audiences haven’t any more of a clue about the risks (including losses or, worse, fraud) than many investment advisers do. That’s a big untold story. If any GBONews readers have delved into this, please send a note and link to this editor.
*** “Five Myths About Baby Boomers,” was Boston-based freelancer Sally Abrahms’ latest placement in the Washington Post (Nov. 6). The United States Census Bureau reports, she says, that the country now has 75.4 million boomers (as of Jan. 1, 2016, from ages 52 to 70). “Larger than the entire population of France, America’s baby boomers are a far more diverse demographic than any of their many stereotypes convey,” she wrote.
Abrams added, “It’s time to debunk some generalizations about the original Me Generation.” She enumerated five myths: Boomers are wealthy; healthier than their parents; selfish; technology-challenged; and don’t have sex. On the latter point Abrams quotes the 2010 National Survey of Sexual Health and Behavior. It found that “38 percent of married men 50 to 59 said they had sex “a few times a month to weekly,” and 35.4 percent of 60- to 69-year-olds concurred. They didn’t trail too far behind young men in their sexual prime; among those in the 25-to-29 set, 46 percent said they had sex that frequently.”
Abrams cautioned, “It’s not all good news, though. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, sexually transmitted diseases [http://tinyurl.com/kevuphy] are hitting boomers hard. STD rates doubled among 50- to 90-year-olds between 2000 and 2010.”
6. GEN BEATLES NEWS
*** Nonprofit Media Maven Deane Beebe is the new Communications and Outreach VP at the New York-based Medicare Rights Center. Beebe, a veteran of several nonprofits in aging, is a great source for reporters on health and long-term care issues. Her new e-mail is dbeebe@medicarerights.org. Replacing her on the communications line at PHI (formerly the Paraprofessional Health Institute) is Karen Kahn, kkahn@PHInational.org; 978-740-9844. PHI is a key advocate for direct-care workers and can be helpful on stories about eldercare.
*** Veteran Age-Beat Blogger and urban administrator Herb Weiss has an especially beefy—and gastronomically incorrect–way to gird up for release of his forthcoming book, Taking Charge: Collected Stories on Aging Boldy. It is a collection of Weiss’ newspaper columns for Rhode Island’s Pawtucket Times and Woonsocket Call. Although he’s written on issues in aging and healthcare for 35 years, since 1999, Weiss has served as the Economic and Cultural Affairs Officer for the City of Pawtucket. In that capacity he’s overseen the effort to transform and revitalize the historic mill town through the arts, for which he’s received kudos, such as the 2004 Pawtucket Foundation Person of the Year Award.
And capacity is what he’ll need to live up to his latest honor: This summer, Pawtucket’s
Spumoni’s Restaurant created its new Herb Weiss Burger. The concoction is a 6-oz. hamburger with shaved steak, Swiss cheese, spicy mayo, sautéed onions, mushrooms, and peppers with lettuce and tomato. Along with sweet potato fries and a local Bucket Brewery Brew, the meal gives new meaning to the phrase, “to die for.”
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The Journalists Network on Generations (JNG), founded in 1993, publishes Generations Beat Online with in-kind support from New America Media (NAM). JNG provides information and networking opportunities for journalists covering generational issues, but not those representing services, products or lobbying agendas. NAM is an online, nonprofit news service reaching 3,000 ethnic media outlets in the United States. GBO News readers are invited to visit the NAM website, and click on the Ethnic Elders section logo on the right side. Opinions expressed in GBO do not represent those of NAM. Copyright 2015, JNG. For more information contact GBO Editor Paul Kleyman.
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