GBO NEWS: House Votes on Older Americans Act; NPF Fellowship Deadline; To Oldly Go. . . ; & More
GENERATIONS BEAT ONLINE NEWS
E-News of the Journalists Network on Generations
March 24, 2016 — Volume 16, 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. 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: A Saner Bit of March Madness.
1. OLDER AMERICANS ACT (ALMOST) REAUTHORIZED: Two good sources on the bill.
2. REPORTING FELLOWSHIP DEADLINE: Apply for National Press Foundation Retirement Fellowship by April 19.
3. THE BOOK BEAT: To Oldly Go: Tales of Intrepid Travel BY THE OVER-60S; ***The Big Move: Life Between the Turning Points, by Anne M. Wyatt-Brown and colleagues.
4. GEN BEATLES NEWS: Bestselling Author Katy Butler to Keynote Coalition for Compassionate Care Summit; ***Former Journalist Mai Der Vang First Hmong American Poet Given Walt Whitman Award.
5. THE STORYBOARD: “Now There’s Proof: Docs Who Get Company Cash Tend to Prescribe More Brand-Name Meds,” by Charles Ornstein and colleagues, ProPublica (March 17); *** “Is Aging With Dignity a Human Right? U.S., Europe Say ‘No,’” by David Bacon, Dollars & Sense/New America Media (March 20); *** “A Push for Less Expensive Hearing Aids,” by Paula Span, New York Times (March 15); *** “The Middle-Age Surge” (and the maturity if the candidates) by David Brooks, New York Times (March 22)
1. OLDER AMERICANS ACT (ALMOST) REAUTHORIZED
Believe it or not, Congress accomplished something this week. The House finally voted to reauthorize the Older Americans Act (OAA) this week. They then bounced it back to the Senate, which passed it last year, to vote on the House version with a few changes that experts on aging say they are expected to approve. If so, it will go to the President for his signature. I Information about the bill in both House and Senate versions is posted by the National Council on Aging website.
OAA provides funding for the U.S. Administration on Aging, as well as the Senior Community Service Employment Program (SCSEP) employment and job-training program for low-income people age 55 or older, administered by the Department of Labor. The law also covers such other programs as home-and-community based services; nutritional programs like Meals on Wheels; health promotion and disease prevention activities for seniors; and programs that protect vulnerable seniors, such as the long-term care ombudsman program.
Also, The Consumer Voice reported, ”After months of negotiations between House members on the House Education and Workforce Committee, an agreement has been reached on the House’s version of the Senate-passed S.192 Older Americans Act (OAA) bill and includes provisions that would make the long-term care ombudsman program more effective and help long-term care consumers. The bill will reauthorize the current OAA, which expired in 2011.”
TheConsumerVoice.org is the National Consumer Voice for Quality Long-Term Care (for age-beat vets, it uses to be the National Citizens’ Coalition for Nursing Home Reform).
Many permanent federal programs are timed to be periodically updated (or downgraded) by Congress, such as having to be reauthorized every five years or so. When the calendar runs out and Congress delays, for instance, over conflicts on proposed changes, they may simply vote to extend the law for a year a time, but with no changes in the programs or funding amount (leaving funds subject to inflation). That’s happened repeatedly since Congress passed OAA in 1965. For seniors, it was part of President Johnson’s Great Society, along with the passage of Medicare and Medicaid.
According to The Consumer Voice, “House S. 192 includes provisions clarifying both organizational and individual conflicts of interest within the Long-Term Care Ombudsman Program; improving resident access to ombudsmen; better protecting the confidentiality of ombudsman information; ensuring that State Ombudsmen receive ongoing training; and, permitting ombudsmen, when feasible, to continue to serve residents transitioning from a long-term care facility to a home care setting.”
2. REPORTING FELLOWSHIP DEADLINE
*** National Press Foundation Retirement Fellowship Application Deadline, April 19: “Aging and Retirement: Understanding Generational Changes” is the theme of this year’s NPF’s annual seminar, to be held in in Washington, D.C., in mid-June. For the all-expenses-paid fellowship seminar, journalists will examine retirement financing; the future of the public safety net for elders; health advances affecting longevity; and how different generations deal with emerging issues.
Reporters selected for the seminar, to run June 12-16, will be covered for airfare, ground transportation, hotel and most meals. Their announcement states, “NPF offers this professional development opportunity for U.S.-based journalists to enhance skills, increase knowledge and recharge their reporting on one of today’s most critical issues.” Funding for this training is provided by Prudential Financial.
Go to the NPF website to apply. If you have technical issues in completing the form, contact idiaz@nationalpress.org for help.
3. THE BOOK BEAT
*** To Oldly Go: Tales of Intrepid Travel BY THE OVER-60S is a title that, were it not so redolent of British eccentricity, would have caused this editor to grimace through his smile. In fact, this collection of 58 international-travel stories, mostly by Brits and Americans, offers a fresh, often funny and sometimes moving perspectives on the world through aging eyes. So often new books arrive on predicable retirement themes–feebleness, finance or frisky living. And while To Go Oldly treks feistily to later-life, although not final frontiers, this tidy paperback (224 pages) offers up many global insights from widely known and recently published travelers alike.
The foreword is by Irish writer Dervla Murphy, a new name to me but one I’ve learned is beloved among peripatetic scribes. She is an immediately engaging observer of the human condition, famously over the handlebars of her bicycle.
Now age 84, she writes that “In the former ‘Third World’”–unlike in Europe, where elderly travelers are met with impatience or indifference–“one is, on the whole, conscious of being respected (perhaps undeservedly) for one’s superior wisdom or at least for having acquired experience of a depth made available only by time.”
Murphy continues, “It often occurs to me that being a Western oldie is fine for those who relish solitude; but not much fun for those who live alone, not needed, not valued for their hard-earned wisdom, feeling surplus to the requirement. In places where extended families and close-knit communities have survived the ravages of globalisation, oldies have a distinct advantage.”
To Go Boldly comes from the well-regarded English publisher, Bradt Travel Guides, co-published in the United States by The Globe Pequot Press (a Rowman & Littlefield imprint), in association with Silver Travel Advisor.
In her introduction, Hilary Bradt, who wrote her first Bradt Guide in 1974, quotes journalist Matthew Parris: “As the years close in, the temptation to become dignified becomes so very strong. We must fight it to the last.” Bradt adds, “The abandonment of dignity is in many cases what this book is about.” She also includes an essay on her lifetime of hitchhiking,
I was especially taken with the essay, “Parahawking in Nepal,” by San Francisco-based medical writer, Mary Jean Pramik. She explains that soon after turning 60, she watched her father, 91, “face death with grace and courage.” Admitting to a lifelong fear of heights, she goes on, “I now vowed to face life without the reticence that had tugged at me for a lifetime. It was in this spirit of abandon that I pulled a running jump off the side of Nepal’s Sarangkot Mountain at 4,818 feet, parahawking with a bird named Kevin.”
No facile bungee-jumper, though, Pramik, stresses, “I hear some people speak of bucket lists and thousands of places to see before they leave this earth, as if travel exists as a checklist to complete. I find that each second spent traveling breathes life into the following moment of time and place.”
She describes her eventual meeting with British paraglider and expert falconer, Scott Mason. He and his crew created the hybrid sport in 2001, to engage people in their Parahawking Project, which they created to raise funds to restore the decimated raptor population of Nepal. Allowing that “vulture have enduring image problem,” Pramik explains that this ecologically important species has died off since the 1990s, when regional farmers fed their animals a drug, which the raptors was later consumed as carrion when the farm stock died.
Leaping off the mountain with two-dozen other paragliders, Pramik was paired with Kevin, an Egyptian vulture trained as a rescue bird. “In flight, we soared eye-to-eye with the enormous birds, following their movements to catch updrafts and keep our chute apparatus aloft. The eyesight of birds betters that of humans by 10-to-15 times. Their keen eyes defined the swirls of dust defining drafts and currents that were invisible to me on this bright, blue-skied day.”
Admittedly, GBONews’ editor is devoted landlubber, a homebody whose idea of world travel a half-century ago was moving a San Francisco, a most amicable destination for the spices of life in cultural diversity and global intercourse. So I’m delighted to discover the realm of travel literature in To Go Boldly, with its world views from high on the shoulders of experience.
Journalists can request a review copy and press information on the book from Hugh Collins, Senior Marketing Executive at Bradt Guides – e-mail; him at hugh.collins@bradtguides.com, or contact Adrian Phillips: adrian.phillips@bradtguides.
*** The Big Move: Life Between the Turning Points, by Anne M. Wyatt-Brown et al, Indiana University Press: Wyatt-Brown, emeritus associate professor in the University of Florida Program in Linguistics, writes of her new life phase, when her husband’s ill health forced them to move into an assisted living facility.
Her essay, in this slim collection (118 pages) includes the reflections on Wyatt-Brown’s situation–finding herself surrounded by frailty, illness and disability–by other gerontologists. Wyatt-Brown describes her transition from an isolated caregiver at home to a member of a lively community that has offered caregiving support and encouraged her to pursue her own interests from exercise to reviewing articles for scholarly journals to singing. The experience reframed her notions of care and community, undoing the stigmas of aging.
Distinguished gerontologists who contributed essays to the book include Ruth Ray Karpen, of Wayne State University, Helen Kivnic of the University of Minnesota; and author Margaret Morganroth Gullette of Brandeis.
4. GEN BEATLES NEWS
*** Katy Butler, author of the New York Times bestseller, Knocking on Heaven’s Door; The Path to a Better Way of Death (Scribner, 2014), will keynote the Coalition for Compassionate Care of California’s 8th Annual Summit, in Newport Beach, Calif., May 12-13. Her talk will focus on the need for a “common language, understandable by patients and families, to express the changing realities of illness and death in an era of high-tech medicine,” says the conference announcement. For media access to the conference, contact Liz Salmi, (916) 993-7772; lsalmi@coalitionccc.org.
*** Congratulations to Mai Der Vang, our former New America Media colleague, went off some years ago from Fresno, Calif., to Columbia University to earn her masters in poetry. The Associated Press announced this week that Vang has become the first Hmong American poet to win the Walt Whitman Award for her debut book. Next year the fine Graywolf Press will publish Afterland, evoking the flight of the Hmong people from the “Secret War” in Laos during the Vietnam War era.
For Mai Der, 34, the award, bestowed by the Academy of American Poets, comes with a $5,000 prize and a six-week residency in Umbria, Italy. The academy will also “purchase thousands of copies for its members and will feature Mai Der Vang in its American Poets magazine and on its website, www.poets.org,” according to the AP.
Aside from her poetry, she has written for the New York Times, Washington Post and the San Francisco Chronicle. In Fresno, Vang worked with NAM’s youth-news training program.
She has also written eloquently of her elders, such as in her poem “Matriarch” (“Grandmother, keeper of jars for flamed cuppings./ She knows where men have been, those falling into/ Tarnished landscapes, …)
5. THE STORYBOARD
*** “Now There’s Proof: Docs Who Get Company Cash Tend to Prescribe More Brand-Name Meds,” by Charles Ornstein, Ryann Grochowski Jones and Mike Tigas, ProPublica (March 17): The more money doctors receive from drug and medical-device companies, the more brand-name drugs they tend to prescribe, found a new ProPublica analysis: “Even a meal can make a difference.” ProPublica partnered with with NPR, Boston Globe, Tampa Bay Times and Seattle Times.
According to Ornstein, “This is the first time, to our knowledge, that such a study has been done to comprehensively look at the relationship between pharma/device company money and prescribing. You may have suspected it—and it might be intuitive—but the proof is in the data.” The investigative team matched Medicare payment records from pharmaceutical and medical device makers with data on doctors’ medication choices. They found, “Doctors who got money from drug and device makers—even just a meal– prescribed a higher percentage of brand-name drugs overall than doctors who didn’t.”
Ornstein noted, “Doctors who received more than $5,000 from companies in 2014 typically had the highest brand-name prescribing percentages.”
*** “Is Aging With Dignity a Human Right? U.S., Europe Say ‘No,’” by David Bacon, Dollars & Sense/New America Media (March 20). As the world’s poorer countries declare dignity for elders a human right, the U.S. is among rich nations arguing against such a global convention. Bacon, an author and investigative journalist, reports, “The Organization of American States recently adopted the first international convention on the human rights of older people–not endorsed by the U.S. The Organization of African Unity (OAU) is debating its own convention and is expected to adopt it next year.” The European Union has also declined to sign on to conventions aimed at protecting elders.
Bacon writes, “Ironically, the world’s poorer countries, presumably those with the fewest resources to deal with aging, are in the vanguard of establishing this set of rights.” The story also includes Bacon’s striking black-and-white photographs.
*** “A Push for Less Expensive Hearing Aids,” by Paula Span, “New Old Age,” New York Times (March 15): News editors and producers have long nodded patronizingly at features or columns about sensory and functional losses among elders. The reality lag in newsrooms–and in Congress–has meant little recognition of the failure in national policy and public attitude that might own up to the unnecessary devastation of common conditions of aging.
Past 70, a person’s often-waning ability to hear, see or eat was long dismissed as inevitable consequences of aging, but science and technology have long since reversed that. Yet, Medicare still refuses to cover advances glasses, hearing aids and dental care (the lack of which results in malnutrition, heart disease and many unnecessary consequences).
So GBONews was very pleased to see Span take on the uncovered and questionably high cost of hearing aids in her last column. She explained that nearly two-in-three Americans 70-plus “have meaningful hearing loss,” but only 20 percent use hearing aids. A major reason is the average cost, about $2,500, or more — per ear. Span added that dental care “ranks high on my personal list of exclusions that make the least sense, but the fact that the 1965 Medicare law specifically prohibits the national insurance program from paying for hearing aids is also a strong contender.”
Of particularly interest to generations-beat reporters is her information that last October’s report by the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology recommended federal actions to “simultaneously decrease the cost of hearing aids, spur technology innovation and increase consumer choice options.”
In response, the Food and Drug Administration will hold a workshop in April to reconsider whether regulations “may hinder innovation, reduce competition and lead to increased cost and reduced use” of hearing aids. Also, in June, the Institute of Medicine will issue a report on hearing health “that tackles key questions like federal regulation, insurance and price.”
*** “The Middle-Age Surge,” by David Brooks, New York Times (March 22) is inspired by journalist Barbara Bradley Hagerty’s new book, Life Reimagined: The Science, Art, and Opportunity of Midlife (Riverhead Books). Echoing her finding that people in their 40s and 50s, far from sliding into a midlife crisis, are more typically apt to shift gears to what’s meaningful, to “choose purpose over happiness.”
Brooks quotes theologian Karl Barth’s view that in midlife people may move “with a ‘measured haste’ to get big new things done while there is still time. What Barth wrote decades ago is even truer today. People are healthy and energetic longer.”
Then Brooks observes, “We have presidential candidates running for their first term in office at age 68, 69 and 74. Greater longevity is changing the narrative structure of life itself.” That, of course, refers, in age order, to Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders. Well, for Trump, one has to suppose that his “’measured haste’ to get big new things done” is not so much inaccurate as assuming a different cast than it does for the others.
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