GBO NEWS: 1 Week to Fellowship Deadline; MediCaring’s LTC Solutions; New LGBT Medicare-Medicaid Rules; Summer Books; & More
GENERATIONS BEAT ONLINE NEWS
E-News of the Journalists Network on Generations
July 22, 2016 — Volume 16, Number 11
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: Here’s GBONews’ Complete Convention Coverage by Everyone’s Correspondent, Walt Whitman: ” … The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem … Here is not merely a nation but a teeming nation of nations.” —Preface to Leaves of Grass.
1. EYES ON THE PRIZE: One Week Left to Journalists in Aging Fellowship Application Deadline—July 29; *** Nursing and Healthcare Workforce Media Fellowship Deadline, Aug. 15.
2. GOOD SOURCES: *** MediCaring Communities: Getting What We Want and Need in Frail Old Age at an Affordable Price, by Joanne Lynn, MD; *** New Justice in Aging Fact Sheets on Medicare-Medicaid LGBT Changes.
3. SUMMER BOOK BEAT: ***The Fate of Gender: Nature, Nurture, and the Human Future, by Frank Browning; *** The Mechanical Horse: How the Bicycle Reshaped American Life, by AARP Magazine Exec. Editor Margaret Guroff; *** Sky Above Clouds: Finding Our Way Through Creativity, Aging, and Illness, by Wendy L. Miller & Gene D. Cohen with Teresa H. Barker
4. THE STORYBOARD: *** “Women more likely than men to face poverty during retirement,” by Adam Allington, Associated Press; *** *** “Employers Are Rethinking Older Worker Stereotypes,” by Chris Farrell, Next Avenue.
1. EYES ON THE PRIZE
ONE WEEK TO FELLOWSHIP DEADLINE — The Journalists in Aging Fellows Program application deadline is Fri., July 29: Sponsored by New America Media and the Gerontological Society of America (GSA) for the seventh year, a panel of journalists and gerontologists will select 15 new Fellows to attend GSA’s Annual Scientific Meeting in New Orleans, Nov. 16-20 (expenses paid), and receive a $1,500 stipend. The project is a collaboration between GSA and New America Media (NAM), with support from the Journalists Network on Generations, publisher of GBONews.org.
Reporters from all media types will be selected by a panel of journalists and gerontologists. Applicants are welcome from both mainstream and ethnic media outlets serving communities within the U.S. (in any language), including staff reporters and freelancers.
Applicants must include a one-to-two page story proposal for a series, package or magazine-length piece to be published or broadcast by Spring 2017. Each Fellow also writes or produces a shorter initial article on any topic in aging (not requiring an advance story pitch) to run within a few weeks after the conference.
In it’s first six years, this fellowship has generated more than 400 news stories by 102 alumni. GSA, a nonpartisan, non-lobbying multidisciplinary association focuses on research from the widest possible spectrum of academic, nonprofit, public and private participants. The fall conference’s 4,000 attendees from all over the world — not just the United States — represent expertise on just about every subject area in aging under the sun.
Funders of this year’s program include the Silver Century Foundation, AARP, the Commonwealth Fund, the Retirement Research Foundation, and the John A. Hartford Foundation.
Application details and form are at http://tinyurl.com/plrvuqy. Questions? Contact: Paul Kleyman (NAM Senior Editor), 415-503-4170 ext. 133; pkleyman@newamericamedia.org; or Todd Kluss, GSA Communications Manager, Ph: (202) 587-2839; e-mail: tkluss@geron.org.
*** Nursing and Healthcare Workforce Media Fellowship Deadline, Aug. 15: Recent graduates and early-career journalists (with five years or less experience) can apply for this eight-month fellowship sponsored by the Center for Health, Media and Policy (CHMP) at Hunter College in New York City. The single fellowship, coming with a $2,000 stipend, will also reimburse the Fellow up to $1,000 for travel, meals and expenses to attend one national journalism or healthcare conference or two regional conferences.
“The goal,” says the announcement, “is to help reporters advance their understanding and coverage of key issues and policy challenges surrounding the U.S. healthcare and nursing workforce.” The Fellowship is supported by a grant from Johnson & Johnson. The focus will especially be on “factors that affect existing and new roles of nurses and other health care providers.” For more information, contact the program’s director, Liz Seegert, at liz@healthmediapolicy.com. Be sure to put “Media Fellow” in the subject line. See the application website for details.
2. GOOD SOURCES
*** MediCaring Communities: Getting What We Want and Need in Frail Old Age at an Affordable Price, by Joanne Lynn, MD, director of Altarum Institute’s Center for Elder Care and Advanced Illness, and her team. Long one of the leading voice on chronic illness and end-of-life care, Lynn offers a “blueprint” for reforming the mess of long-term care in the United States. It was for good reason that back in 2000, Bill Moyers interviewed Lynn prominently in the concluding episode of his benchmark series on dying in America, On Our Own Terms.
MediCaring Communities, 194 pages, details ways federal, state and local healthcare systems can adapt current programs “to focus on the explosion of frail elderly people and serve them well, even as we also work to decrease the per capita cost of health care,” Lynn said on the book’s recent release. “Paradoxically, if we pay more attention to services and supports that are largely provided in the home, we can reduce utilization of the highest-cost medical services and use a portion of the savings to build stronger support systems in our communities.”
Lynn stressed, “Today, elders have instant access to high-cost services and drugs, but families struggling to support a loved one with dementia cannot find respite, or personal care. We need to shift the care system to be able to provide easy access to the services that people really want.”
But Wait, There’s More–Lynn and her Altarum policy-research team showed significant cost savings by using her MediCaring Communities model in their July 5 article in the respected journal, The Milbank Quarterly. Applying what she termed a “very conservative financial simulation” Lynn and her colleagues compare current costs with MediCaring’s home-and-community-based approach, they examined care in four communities in Ohio, Oregon, Virginia and Queens, N.Y. Depending on the location, they calculated savings ranging from $269 and $537 per-person per-month, while providing more human and desired care. Multiply that by millions of people over the years and you’re talking about Trump money.
For a media review copy of the MediCaring Communities book in print of an e-version, contact Altarum’s Elizabeth Blair, Elizabeth.Blair@altarum.org, 202-776-5107; or Ken Schwartz Ken.Schwartz@altarum.org. To speak with Lynn, she is available at joanne.lynn@altarum.org.
*** Medicare and Medicaid Changes for LGBT People are explained in three new fact sheets from Justice in Aging (formerly the National Senior Citizens Law Center). In a July 21 announcement, the nonprofit explained that the U.S. Supreme Court’s legalization of same-sex marriage in all states changed how both programs evaluate the eligibility of same sex spouses: “Depending on the program and the individual’s circumstances, the changes can be positive or negative.” Also, Medicare now covers gender-reassignment surgery and has issued “new rules that protect transgender older adults from sex discrimination in healthcare.”
The fact sheets are:
** “Medicare Changes for Transgender Older Adults”
** “Marriage, Medicare, and Medicaid: What Same-Sex Couples Need to Know”
** And “Accessing Information on Medicare Benefits for LGBT People.”
All are also available at the National Resource Center for LGBT Aging. Justice in Aging produced them in partnership with SAGE (Services & Advocacy for Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, & Transgender Elders), the SHIP National Network (State Health Insurance Assistance Programs), and the federal Administration for Community Living (ACL).
3. SUMMER BOOK BEAT
Whether you’re heading to the beach, the hills or other climes, packing a Kindle or the satisfying heft of tales between covers, here are some recent titles to bring along for those hours of grateful relief from your wifi.
*** The Fate of Gender: Nature, Nurture, and the Human Future, by former NPR science reporter Frank Browning, (Bloomsbury): For his sixth book, Browning profiled a wide range people and settings, such as gender-neutral kindergartens in Chicago and Oslo, conservative Catholics in Paris, and transsexual Mormon parents in Utah.
Browning, who had support for his final chapter, “Gender and Resilience,” from the NAM-GSA Journalists in Aging Fellowship (sponsored by the Silver Century Foundation), examines differing response to aging between men and women around the world based on their earlier life habits.
Andy Scharlach, who directs UC Berkeley’s Center for the Advanced Study of Aging Services, told him, Browning writes, “Resilience, it turns out, is one of the keys to successful aging: Over and over again, Scharlach’s research has shown that women generally retain far more resilience as they age than men.” (For an excerpt, read Browning’s 2015 article for NAM, based on his longer fellowship story for California Magazine.)
Overall The Fate of Gender stresses that the categories of “male” and “female,” “gay” and “straight” seem outdated, have become calcified and are rapidly changing. For a press review copy and media kit, contact Bloomsbury’s Anthony LaSasso, 212-419-5361; anthony.lasasso@bloomsbury.com.
*** The Mechanical Horse: How the Bicycle Reshaped American Life, by Margaret Guroff, University of Texas Press. Yes, that Meg Guroff, executive editor of AARP the Magazine. It’s her first book — and what fun. If you find yourself getting a bit fatigued on the generations beat, do what Meg did and peddle back to the past for a few hours away from our editorial traffic jam. You’ll learn, for instance, about the roles in popularizing bikes played by 19th century suffragette Amelia Bloomer, whose name is immortalized in the blousy pants she designed for freewheeling feminists of her day. Guroff also tells of how 1980s bike messengers rolled forth today’s critical mass of bicycling.
Says the publisher’s release, “The Mechanical Horse reveals how the bicycle transformed American life. As bicycling caught on in the 19th century, many of the country’s rough, rutted roads were paved for the first time, laying a foundation for the interstate highway system. Cyclists were among the first to see the possibilities of self-directed, long-distance travel, and some of them (including a fellow named Henry Ford) went on to develop the automobile. Women shed their cumbersome Victorian dresses—as well as their restricted gender roles—so they could ride. And doctors recognized that aerobic exercise actually benefits the body, which helped to modernize.
*** Sky Above Clouds: Finding Our Way Through Creativity, Aging, and Illness, by Wendy L. Miller & Gene D. Cohen with writer Teresa H. Barker (Oxford University Press): The loss of Gene Cohen, MD, to cancer in 2009, at the cusp of his own elderhood, was a blow not only to those who cared deeply for this most-caring of individuals, but also to those, whether in gerontology of journalism, who understood his role in improving our grasp of how mass longevity will impact on our lives and society.
Cohen’s academic work and popular writing, such as his 2005 book The Mature Mind: The Positive Power of the Aging Brain (Basic Books), helped to bridge the science of the brain to our new era of human potential. He substantively countered long-held stereotypes of old dogs unable to learn new techs, one might say today.
Widely considered a founder of geriatric psychiatry, Cohen, former acting director of the National Institute of Aging, went on to found the Center on Aging, Health & Humanities at George Washington University. Keenly interested in creativity in later life, he also co-founded the National Center for Creative Aging and oversaw research showing the health and mental health benefits of the arts on older people.
Now, his wife, artist and art therapist Wendy Miller, has published Sky Above Clouds, integrating her experience both as an art therapist and as a caregiver for Cohen as his health failed, with her late husband’s writings on the science of the brain and possibilities of the aging heart. Calling it “a powerful book” a review on the American Art Therapy Association website (June 22), says the volume should “resonate with caregivers caring for loved ones with other ailments. It is widely relatable.”
Reviewer, Angel C. Duncan, of the Neuropsychiatric Research Center of Southwest Florida, continues by explaining that Sky Above Clouds eloquently maps life’s journey in body, psyche, soul and family. She writes, “Regardless as to whether a reader is interested in older adult populations, whether or not one is or has faced grief and illness, Sky Above Clouds offers a realistic portrait for any art therapist, physician, or caregiver to reflect on in grief, communication, ageism, and creativity.”
To request press review copies and information contact Michelle Kelly at Michelle.Kelly@oup.com; (212) 726-6172. Wendy Miller’s website for the book is www.sky-above-clouds.com, and she can be reached at wendmiller1@gmail.com; 240 988-6170.
4. THE STORYBOARD
*** “Women more likely than men to face poverty during retirement,” by Adam Allington, Associated Press (July 11): Joan Entmacher, of the National Women’s Law Center, says “the solution to the retirement (funding) crisis starts with the earnings and wage gap.” Allington continues, “That gap narrowed between the 1970s and 1990s, but stopped shrinking in 2001. Women earn about 76 cents to 79 cents on the dollar, compared with men. Women are more likely to report that Social Security is the biggest source of income — 50 percent to 38 percent for men, according to a recent poll by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. Women are 14 percentage points less likely to say they will receive a pension.”
More likely to take on caregiving responsibilities, women often end up in part-time jobs, often for lower wages without benefits. Allington continues, “Over a 40-year career, the pay gap between men and women adds up to an average of $430,480, according to the Census Bureau. For minorities and women of color, the number is much higher. ‘If we are talking about a 65-year-old black woman, she was born before desegregation,’ says Karen Lincoln, a professor at the University of Southern California and director of a center for geriatric social work.”
*** “Employers Are Rethinking Older Worker Stereotypes: Some are progressive, others are dealing with an urgent skills shortage,” by Chris Farrell, Next Avenue (July 8): “Surveys repeatedly show that boomers want to keep earning an income well into the traditional retirement years . . . . The big question is: are employers ready to embrace them as employees?”
Farrell reports on Columbia University’s 2016 Age Boom Academy, where he moderated a panel highlighting two employers that had earned an Age Smart Employers Award from Robert N. Butler Columbia Aging Center and its partners. “One of them, Brooks Brothers, has a 219-person Long Island factory, more than half of whom are over 55. Luis Nava, who manages it, said the company values older workers, especially because they make few mistakes. In return, he’s willing to let them take greater control of their schedules. Also, he said, “we pair older workers with usually a younger person with technical experience.”
At the other, Metro Optics, an ophthalmic services company based in The Bronx, about a third of the workers are 50+. “The older employees train the younger ones,” said the company’s co-founder, John Bonzio. “It works the other way, too.”
Overall, the U.S. labor force participation rate of Americans 65 and older in 2014 was roughly 19 percent, up from about 12 percent in 1994, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. “The only thing that makes the employer move is a sense that there is a lack of qualified labor,” said Columbia professor Ursula Staudinger, founding director of the Butler center. “Then they become very creative and inventive with their employees.”
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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 2016, JNG. For more information contact GBO Editor Paul Kleyman.
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