GBO NEWS: Health Journalism 2016; Sally Field, 70, on New Film & Aging; ‘Hidden Poor’ Seniors; Flawed Retirement ‘Nudge’ Policies; & More
GENERATIONS BEAT ONLINE NEWS
E-News of the Journalists Network on Generations
March 10, 2016 — Volume 16, Number 4
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: Campaign 2016 — Making America Grate, Again.
1. DATES TO REMEMBER: Health Journalism 2016 in Cleveland; ***Disease Drivers of Aging: 2016 Advances in Geroscience Summit in New York; ***2016 National Mature Media Awards Deadline, March 31.
2. GEN BEATLES NEWS: Double Oscar Winner Sally Field, nearing 70, on Aging and New Film
3. THE BOOK BEAT: *** “Last Comforts: Notes from the Forefront of Late-Life Care” by Ellen Rand
4. GOOD SOURCES: “Hidden Health Problems Among California’s Hidden Poor” Seniors from UCLA Center for Health Policy Research
5. FISCAL REFORM SCHOOL: NYT Stories Expose Pitfalls for Retirement Savings — *** “Why Trading in Retirement Is a Bad Idea,” by John F. Wasik; *** “Nudges Aren’t Enough for Problems Like Retirement Savings” by Eduardo Porter; *** “A Smarter Plan to Make Retirement Savings Last” plus “nudge economics” critiques by Teresa Ghilarducci.
1. DATES TO REMEMBER
*** “Health Journalism 2016” to Rock & Roll in Cleveland: With conference sessions in rooms named for musical luminaries from Elvis the King to B.B. (the Long-Lived) King, the Association of Health Care Journalists (AHCJ) annual Health Journalism conclave is set for Rock City, April 7-10. Among the dozens of topical and career-development sessions will be several of special interest to GBONews readers:
“Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s: Trends to Watch in 2016 and Beyond” (in the Bruce Springsteen room): The Boss’ panel will focus on neurodegenerative diseases, especially Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. Experts will explore such questions as, “What exactly is it about exercise that may ward off Alzheimer’s or relieve the symptoms of Parkinson’s? What might the rise of biomarkers mean for preventing dementia – and can recent declines in dementia be sustained? What’s the real promise of high-tech brain imaging before symptoms even arise? Which are the trials to watch – and how can patients get involved?”
Session moderator, Charlotte Sutton, health and science editor, Philadelphia Inquirer, will lead a panel of experts from the Cleveland Clinic’s centers for cognitive neuroimaging and brain health, as well as from Case Western Reserve University (CWRU) School of Medicine’s Parkinson’s and Movement Disorder Center.
“Defining a Good Death — and How to Cover It” (Gen Beatles can meet in–where else– the Beatles room): The panel will cogitate over the ethical, medical, patient and family issues journalists need to be covering when they are writing about dying, end-of-life care and a “good” death. What is a good deal, and what isn’t it? What are good death options and who choses them? What challenges do family members and the health care system have with letting go? And what should reporters know about the language of death and dying?
Symposium organizer Eileen Beal will bring together authorities from the CWRU’s Bolton School of Nursing; Hospice of the Western Reserve; and Ohio End of Life Options; along with journalist Ellen Rand, author of the new book Final Comfort (see “The Book Beat” elsewhere in this issue).
“Medicare in Flux: MACRA and the New Payment Models Coming to Your Community,” (Stop! In the Name of Health — in The Supremes room): “When Congress did away with the much-maligned Sustainable Growth Rate formula for paying physicians under Medicare, it put forth a law called MACRA that will dramatically change the way Medicare pays doctors,” says the session blurb. Politico’s Erin Mershon will lead an expert panel including speakers from the Urban Institute, American Osteopathic Association, American College of Physicians and the Cleveland Clinic
There will also be a wide range of other sessions, such as “Medicine Via Smartphone,” “Will Innovative Cancer Care Reach Patients?” “Cybersecurity: Understanding the Risks,” “Concussions,” and “The Tyranny of Geography: Place, Race and Social Determinates of Health.”
Check out the full conference program and registration info at the AHCJ website.
*** Disease Drivers of Aging: 2016 Advances in Geroscience Summit will elevate a very distinguished group of experts to the dais at the New York Academy of Sciences (NYAS) Conference Center, April 13–14. The program notice says the multidisciplinary summit “will explore how chronic diseases — specifically HIV/AIDS, diabetes, and cancer — can affect the molecular pillars of aging.”
Some of the participants will be Felipe Sierra, PhD, National Institute on Aging (NIA); Steven Austad, PhD, University of Alabama at Birmingham; Elissa Epel, PhD, University of California, San Francisco; Nir Barzilai, MD, Albert Einstein College of Medicine; and Kevin High, MD, Wake Forest University. Sponsors besides NYAS include the Gerontological Society of America, American Federation for Aging Research and Trans-NIH GeroScience Interest Group.
***Deadline Reminder: USC Annenberg’s Center for Health Journalism’s 2016 National Health Journalism Fellowship application deadline is March 18. The national fellowship has two components offering $2,000-$10,000 reporting grants each for a total of 20 working reporters in both the ethnic and mainstream media. The chosen few will get an all-expenses-paid trip to Los Angeles, July 17-21, for “workshops, seminars and a field trip that will enrich your understanding of the challenges facing vulnerable children and their families, including how community conditions help determine their prospects for health and well-being.” Intergenerational projects are welcomed. The competition is open to both newsroom staffers and freelancers. For more information, visit the website linked above or e-mail Martha Shirk at Cahealth@usc.edu. USC suggests, “To improve your prospects for success, we strongly recommend that you discuss your project idea with us in advance (and no later than March 16).
***The 2016 National Mature Media Awards [http://tinyurl.com/k2xx6bf] deadline is March 31. The competition, marking 25 years this round, gives gold, silver, bronze, and merit recognition in 41 entry categories (from editorial to advertising) in a dozen divisions. Many nonprofits apply. The fee is $59 per entry. For more information, check out their website, e-mail: info@seniorawards.com, or call 800-828-8225.
2. GEN BEATLES NEWS
*** Double Oscar winner Sally Field attributes ageism in Hollywood not to often-criticized casting directors, but to what film executives “put into development? What writers do they hire to write what stories? Forget whether they will be, you know, for what actresses or for what talent will go into it. It’s what they put their efforts into develop in the first place.”
Field, who turns 70 on Nov. 6, has already received kudos for her star-turn as an older woman in the new film, Hello, My Name Is Doris. In her NPR Weekend Edition interview (March 5), Field described her character, “Doris,” to Lourdes Garcia-Navarro: “Well she’s a woman who’s my age, which is not young — in late, late 60s. She has spent her life really taking care of her mother but suppressing herself in every way. Doris has some borderline personality issues so she’s not totally present in the real world. The story really is a coming of age — of a woman of age.” Co-star Tyne Daly was 70 on February 21.
Garcia-Navarro asked Field to comment on praise she’s from critics who have called her performance “brave,” because “you look your age and apparently that in modern Hollywood qualifies as bravery.” Field, also noted for her heart-breaking Oscar-nominated portrayal of Mary Todd Lincoln in Lincoln (2013), smartly replied, “You know, isn’t that sad? I mean, I appreciate them saying that rather than them trying to chop me to pieces. But I’m an old woman, 70 is old, and that’s OK.”
Field continued, “I’ve gathered strength behind my years, I owned them, I’ve earned them, I’ve deserved them, I have a right to have them. And I don’t like my neck, I don’t like a lot of things but it’s OK, it’s OK. Behind my years I have value that doesn’t come when you’re 50 or 40 or 30 or 20, it doesn’t come until you’ve been in that saddle for a number of years.”
This editor, however, is holding back the “right ons” until he can actually see the flick. The trailer’s sex-sale appeal surrounds Doris with admiring young (white) media-tech guys at her company. Patronizing? The writer-director greenlighted for “development” of this project, Michael Showalter, 45, is a rising lensman from the entertainment world’s young, male ranks of comedycrats.
The advance notices suggest that Doris’ story is more hopeful than the trailer’s impression of mere gender reversal. That is, a dolled-up senior ingénue chasing her youth, rather than the usual Pacino-De Niro silver fox paring up with a daughter-aged skirt. Maybe. But with exceptions, Hollywood is in development with the same-young, same-young, these days–the Millennial demographic–while making slim attempts to appeal to the richer boomer market. That would require films with scripts delving into leading characters who interact through considerable life experience, not only play off of the young as a comic-dramatic foil.
Doris is just opening this month in theaters around the country, and this movie buff is ready to pop for “two senior tickets, please.” Just give me one great scene, such as Bruce Dern had in Nebraska with Will Forte as his son, or Lily Tomlin and Sam Elliott performed in last year’s Grandma, films that mined the insights of longevity.
3. THE BOOK BEAT
*** “Last Comforts: Notes from the Forefront of Late-Life Care” is a new book by Ellen Rand, a journalist for 40 years and former The New York Times housing columnist. A hospice volunteer in her home community of Teaneck, N.J., Rand asserts herself as an ”optimist” even in facing this difficult moment of life.
She acknowledges, “As we baby boomers approach old age and its likely infirmities – no doubt kicking and screaming – we must confront some unwelcome questions. How do we want to be cared for in our lives’ closing chapters? Who’s going to take care of us, and where? How can we avoid the nightmarish, ‘medicalized’ ends that too many of our parents suffered?”
She goes on, however, “My aim is to spotlight ways that late-life care in the not-too-distant future might look dramatically different.” In the book, which she is self-publishing with the imprint Cypress Publishing, Rand says she has documented such positive developments as new models for coordinated care and culture change in long-term care settings; inroads in medical and nursing education; important developments in compassionate and effective dementia care; leaders who are addressing the unique challenges faced by minority and LGBT populations; technological innovations; and public policy approaches affecting late-life care delivery and financing. One chapter is titled “The Long and Winding Road to Cultural Competence.”
Rand will release the book in April. Writers/producers can contact her for information and a review copy at ellen.rand@gmail.com; tel.: 201-836-6852; cell: 201-264-4483.
4. GOOD SOURCES
*** “Hidden Health Problems Among California’s Hidden Poor” is an important new Fact Sheet from the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research showing that almost one in four quarter Californians ages 65 and older, who live alone or with only their spouse or partner, “had income in 2013 in the limbo of unofficial poverty,” above the 50-year-old federal poverty level (FPL) but below a newer, more accurate measure of how much people actually need to make financial ends meet.
They compare the FPL to the alternative Elder Economic Security Standard Index (Elder Index). Rather than try to update the FPL, which was created in the early 1960s using 1955 data, the Elder Index pinpoints what seniors actually need to make a “decent minimum standard of living.” For each of California’s 58 counties, the index calculates the cost of such necessities as housing, food, health care and transportation. The new measure shows that the national average is about double the official poverty level of $11,770 in 2016–and triple that sum in many urban areas.
UCLA’s analysis found California has 655,000 “hidden poor”–one-in-four seniors in the Golden State–who fall between the official poverty line and the higher Elder Index threshold. They are almost twice as likely to identify as being in poor or fair health, feel depressed, and say they cannot get timely health care compared to more affluent seniors, says the study.
Furthermore, the researchers report, “Latino, African-American and Asian older adults who lived alone or with only their spouse/partner had the highest rates of being among the hidden poor (35.4, 30.6 and 29.2 percent, respectively). Adding these figures to those falling under the official poverty line exposes that about half of Latino,
African-American and Asian elders struggle to get by. And older non-Hispanic whites aren’t all that well off, either. Whites are at almost three times their official poverty rate–21.5 percent versus the government’s 8.1 percent, according to the study.
To crunch the number, UCLA’s center partnered with the Insight Center for Community Economic Development. Authors of the study were the center’s director, Steven P. Wallace, PhD, swallace@ucla.edu, 310-794-0910; and Padilla-Frausto, MPH, ifrausto@ucla.edu, 310-794-0389. They based their finding on data from the U.S. Census American Community Survey and 2013-2014 California Health Interview Survey.
5. FISCAL REFORM SCHOOL
Stories Expose Pitfalls for Retirement Savings:
*** “Why Trading in Retirement Is a Bad Idea,” by John F. Wasik examines investors’ danger from “a punishing stock market downturn that reduces not only their income stream but also their total wealth.” He wisely advises that individuals “seek out a fiduciary — that is, someone legally obligated to put your best interests first. They should not receive a commission from selling you anything. They can charge by the hour, a flat fee or a percentage fee based on annual assets under management.”
Wasik cites Nobel laureates George A. Akerlof and Robert J. Shiller, authors of Phishing for Phools: The Economics of Manipulation and Deception (Princeton University Press, 2015). They warn against “the siren call of Wall Street’s latest darlings” when brokers go “phishing.” He explains, “That’s when a profit can be made off deception, enthusiasm, weakness and greed,” which can derail millions of retirement portfolios.
He also links to a 2015 study in the Review of Finance titled, ”Bubbling with Excitement: An Experiment” by economists Terrance Odean, Eduardo Andrade and Shengle Lin.
They begin, “From ‘tulipmania’ of 1637 to the ‘irrational exuberance’ of the late 1990s, popular accounts emphasize the role of emotions, and excitement in particular, on investment bubbles.” However, finding no direct causal evidence in academic literature to link the intoxication of easy money to actually hastening asset-pricing bubbles–driving up prices based on falsely high expectations, the professors decided to experiment. They used emotionally-charged video clips with 495 University of California, Berkeley, to sweeten their moods while they participated in investment exercises.
The study found that individuals naturally get excited by investing during simulated bubbles and are often blinded by emotion. People may not understand how vulnerable they are when the bubble pops. Maybe Facebook should introduce a new emoticon for overly eager investors, say, a bug-eyed one gobbling up dollar bills that drop behind in a pile to fertilize a patch of grass.
Wasik’s story is one of two he has in the latest New York Times special “Retirement” section. [http://tinyurl.com/z4bwmuo]
*** “Nudges Aren’t Enough for Problems Like Retirement Savings” by Eduardo Porter, NYT (Feb. 23), calls into question the view of psychologists (and the policymakers who listen to them) that Americans don’t salt away enough, even when employers promise to match their savings, mainly because they are procrastinating. One result has been the widely promoted cure of signing employees up for a 401(k) automatically and giving them the choice to opt out, rather than giving workers the responsibility to sign up.
Porter acknowledges, “The switch has led to a sharp increase in workers’ participation in retirement savings plans.” Yet, he asserts, “the approach poses a risk, too. It fosters a belief that tweaks based on an understanding of people’s psychology could lead to a vastly improved society at little or no cost to taxpayers.”
He continues, though, “Given Washington’s political paralysis, it’s no surprise that ‘nudges’ like these are all the rage in the Obama administration, which has brought in some leading behavioral experts.” In 2009, the White House hired Cass R. Sunstein — a legal scholar who coauthored the book Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness (Yale University Press, 2008).
Porter goes on, “But here is the reality check: We haven’t yet nudged ourselves out of a retirement trap. Traditional defined-benefit pensions have all but disappeared in the private sector, but only 40 percent of American families in the bottom half of the income distribution have any form of retirement savings plan. And even among those who have one, their savings total, on average, is just $40,000.”
He emphasizes that the United States “has the deepest poverty rates among rich countries . . . . If the question is whether policy makers can cheaply nudge Americans out of destitution onto a path to prosperity, the answer must be no.”
Porter connects to a recent study by Carnegie Mellon University economist George Loewenstein, a noted critic of “nudges,” and his colleagues. Their report “suggests that fancy cognitive tricks may fail to overcome the main obstacle faced by the poor: a lack of money.”
The NYT business columnist continues, “Experiments by Professor [Edlar] Shafir at Princeton and others have documented how poverty itself leads people to make self-destructive decisions, perhaps by forcing them to focus attention on satisfying immediate needs to the exclusion of other considerations.”
Regarding retirement savings,, Porter adds, “The government has encouraged employers to nudge their employees into opening savings accounts. But what if the problem is bigger? What if workers simply cannot assess how much they need to save today to navigate turbulent financial markets and still have a decent nest egg 20, 30 years down the road?”
Loewenstein told Porter that if policy authorities adopt the flawed “nudge” approach to retirement savings, making it a little bit more viable, but not enough to meet the problem of inadequate retirement security, “people won’t recognize how bankrupt the concept is.”
*** “A Smarter Plan to Make Retirement Savings Last,” by labor economist Teresa Ghilarducci and Hamilton E. James, CEO of Blackstone money management (NYT, Jan. 1), calls for the creation of new government-managed guaranteed retirement accounts (GRAs) to replace the “broken” system that combines 401(k)s and IRAs. Those current instruments place the burden of investments on often-unsophisticated consumers.
Responding to a GBONews question about Eduardo Porter’s column, Ghilarducci, of The New School, e-mailed GBONews, “I have been challenging the behavioral theorists and nudge as a way to solve big social problems on the cheap for the last 10 years.”
James and Ghilarducci, who is author of the new book How to Retire with Enough Money: And How to Know What Enough Is” (Workman Publishing, 2015), explained in their NYT op-ed, “Under our proposal, all workers and employers will have to make regular payments into a GRA, which builds until retirement age, then pays out a supplemental stream of income until that person and his or her beneficiary die.”
In another report, Ghilarducci and her colleagues challenged the present 401(k)/IRA tax breaks–$100 billion federally and $20 billion for states. Instead, they wrote, GRAs would provide refundable federal tax credits to focus more effectively on middle- and lower-income workers.
Ghilarducci, also the author of When I’m Sixty-Four: The Plot against Pensions and the Plan to Save Them” (Princeton, 2008), noted to GBONews some additional analysis she and colleagues have done. It may be particularly helpful, she said, for those following economic research “that challenges nudge policies and ‘inertia’ or ‘flawed human thinking and decisions’ as the framework for describing why the current system of voluntary, individual-directed, commercial accounts fails.”
So lace up your hiking boots to get into these financial weeds, something this editor concedes he tromps into enthusiastically: “The High Cost of Nudge Economics and the Efficiency of Mandatory Retirement Accounts,” Proceedings, Annual Conference on Taxation and Minutes of the Annual Meeting of the National Tax Association (2009).
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