GBO NEWS: Aging-Fellowship Deadline Extended; GOP & Dem Platforms; Dr. Bill Disrupts Aging; Summer Books 2; Dem & GOP Platforms on Entitlements; & More
GENERATIONS BEAT ONLINE NEWS
E-News of the Journalists Network on Generations
July 29, 2016 — Volume 16, Number 12
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: You Are “The Real One.”
1. EYES ON THE PRIZE: ***Journalists in Aging Fellowship Application Deadline Extended to Aug. 15.
2. CALENDAR: *** AHCJ Journalism Workshop on Health Information Technology in San Francisco, Oct. 13-14; *** Dr. Bill Thomas’ “Age of Disruption” Tour in15 cities this fall; *** Grand Old Election Platforms on Social Security & Medicare, for Nov. 8.
3. SUMMER BOOK BEAT (Part 2): *** Elder Care Journey: A View from the Front Lines,” by Laura Katz Olson, SUNY Press (June 2016): *** Lies, Incorporated: The World of Post-Truth Politics, by Ari Rabin-Havt (including the push to privatize Social Security); ***The Brooklyn Experience: The Ultimate Guide to Neighborhoods & Noshes, Culture & the Cutting Edge, by sometime age-beat writer Ellen Freudenheim; *** Married at Fourteen: A True [Boomer] Story, by Lucille Lang Day.
4. THE STORYBOARD: *** “Senior Surprise: Getting switched with little warning into Medicare Advantage,” by Susan Jaffe, Kaiser Health News; *** “AP Exclusive: Pricey Drugs Overwhelm Medicare Safeguard,” by Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar, Associated Press/Seattle Times; *** “Nursing Home Residents Still Vulnerable to Abuse,” Editorial Board, New York Times; *** Here’s How The GOP Is Concealing Its Plans To Cut Social Security,” by Daniel Marans, Huffington Post; ***Two on Working Longer from the Minneapolis StarTribune: “Will You Really Be Able to Work into Your 70s?” by Chris Farrell (July 26), and “Working Past ‘Retirement Age’ Is Beneficial,” by Katy Read, (July 27); *** Radio Producer Karen Michel’s Profiles of Women Artists Ages 89 and 101, NPR Weekend Edition; *** “Why don’t millennials contribute to IRAs?” by Rodney Brooks, Washington Post; “Smart Financial Moves for Surviving Spouses,” by Jane Clark, Kiplinger’s Personal Finance; *** “Oral Health in California: What About Older Adults?” by Amber Cutler, Justice in Aging Issue Brief.
1. EYES ON THE PRIZE
FELLOWSHIP DEADLINE EXTENDED — The Journalists in Aging Fellows Program Has Extended Its Application Deadline to Aug. 15, 2016: 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. This project is a collaboration between GSA and New America Media (NAM), with support from the Journalists Network on Generations, publisher if GBONews.org.
Reporters from all media types will be selected by a panel of journalists and gerontologists from both mainstream and ethnic media outlets serving communities within the U.S. (in any language). Both staff reporters and freelancers are welcome.
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 chosen must also write or produce a shorter initial article on any topic in aging (not requiring an advance story pitch) to run within weeks of the conference.
In its 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, an encyclopedic roster of sources for journalists. 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.
The 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.
2. CALENDAR
*** “Journalism Workshop on Health Information Technology” is an Association of Health Care Journalists (AHCJ) workshop set for San Francisco, Oct. 13-14. The program, to be held at the Sir Francis Drake Hotel along downtown’s cable car tracks, will explore developments from electronic health records to telemedicine to the latest consumer gadgets–and more. AHCJ promises the workshop “will give journalists a look at the roles of government, the tech industry, health care providers and – last but not least – consumers.” Among the sessions will be “How Health IT Impacts an Aging Population,” with experts from the University of California and Stanford and to be moderated by GBONews Editor Paul Kleyman. More on this later. Meanwhile, check it out on the AHCJ website.
*** Dr. Bill’s “Age of Disruption” Tour: Iconoclast and innovator Bill Thomas, MD, will be bringing his nonfiction theatrical Age of Disruption Tour to 15 cities this fall, from Minneapolis on Sept. 19, to Houston on Nov. 18. The Harvard-trained geriatrician has worked for over two decades to revolutionize nursing home care through his innovative Eden Alternative and small, residential-model Green Houses. The most recent of his books is Second Wind: Navigating the Passage to a Slower, Deeper and More Connected Life (2015 paperback, Simon & Schuster).
Each whistlestop on the tour unpacks two performances. The afternoon “Disrupt Dementia” program features excerpts from a new film by the director of the remarkable Alive Inside, on the power of music for Alzheimer’s and other patients, also with live music and stories from African musician, Samité, and Nate Silas Richardson, along with co-hosts Dr. Jennifer Carson and Kyrié Carpenter.
The evening brings Thomas’ “Aging: Life’s Most Dangerous Game.” Think of the shows as hyper-TED talks with rhythm and blues. Thomas is a great interview and a showman (sometimes on stilts), who is actually accomplishing change in a field (long-term care) still getting too little attention. There’s a short video on the tour site to you an inkling of what it’s about. For a media pass or to set up and interview with Thomas, contact Kavan Peterson, kavanpeterson@gmail.com; 410-929-3052.
*** GRAND OLD ELECTION PLATFORMS, NOV. 8–Just so you have them handy, here are links to both party platforms with the exact language on their positions on federal programs for seniors: *The 2016 Democratic Party Platform (July 21): The sections on “Protecting and Expanding Social Security” and “Ensuring a Secure and Dignified Retirement” are on pages 6-7. *The 2016 Republican Party Platform: “Preserving Medicare and Medicaid “ and “Saving Social Security” are on pages 23-24.
3. SUMMER BOOK BEAT (Part 2)
*** Elder Care Journey: A View from the Front Lines,” by Laura Katz Olson, SUNY Press (June 2016): Olson also, she contributed a related blog on July 27 to Stat (“Reporting from the frontiers of health and medicine” and a good site to subscribe to).
Olson’s Stat piece is, “Trying to Find Adequate Elder Care is a Bureaucratic and Personal Nightmare.” She begins, “I’ve been studying elder care for more than 40 years. My special interest is how social welfare policies affect long-term care. But what I have learned during my career didn’t fully prepare me when I was suddenly thrust into a grueling long-distance caregiving role for my mother, Dottie.”
Her Mom, 83, is a medal-winning Florida Senior Olympics athlete in swimming, basketball and bicycle racing. She got by financially on a small Social Security pension, “but didn’t have much of a cushion in savings or other assets. She lived contentedly alone for decades in a public housing apartment.” Then “my mom became steadily incapacitated by Parkinson’s disease and a gradual loss of vision. Finding care for her was a challenge, especially from 1,200 miles away.”
*** Lies, Incorporated: The World of Post-Truth Politics, by Ari Rabin-Havt and the progressive research group Media Matters for America (Anchor): The book goes after the tobacco lobby’s cozy relationship with policymakers. And it digs into many other issues, such as by profiling Blackstone Group co-founder Peter G. Peterson (a Commerce Secretary under Richard M. Nixon), who has spent four decades pushing for the privatization of Social Security.
*** The Brooklyn Experience: The Ultimate Guide to Neighborhoods & Noshes, Culture & the Cutting Edge, by Ellen Freudenheim (Rutgers University Press): If you’re bicycling, driving, running or flying eastward, this book may help wheel you around Brooklyn with help from its 360 pages, 38 photographs and a map. Freudenheim has written on aging, among other topics, for many years, and penned the 2004 book, Looking Forward: An Optimist’s Guide to Retirement. The Brooklyn Experience is Freudenheim’s fourth revised guide to Brooklyn and her fifth book.
*** Married at Fourteen: A True Story, by Lucille Lang Day, Heyday Books (2012). I recently had one of those “who knew?” moments in reconnecting after several years with an acquaintance from the Northern California Science Writers Association. Lucy Day directed the Hall of Health, an interactive children’s museum in Berkeley, and I was aware she’s published her poetry and stories. But I had missed her 2012 wild-ride of a memoir, Married at Fourteen, which had won the PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Literary Award and was a finalist for the Northern California Book Award in Creative Nonfiction. And for good reason.
Day, who is today a grandmother of four, is among the many aging boomers who have engaged in life review. But this should be among those topping the high bar for people aspiring to recognition beyond the family fold. Day’s tale is not only one of teen pregnancy and its afterlife, but also of daunting struggles in parenthood (both hers and her parents), Hell’s Angels, joyful births, tragic deaths, many loves, and a lifetime’s education from working-class Oakland to earning four advance degrees (a PhD in science among them) and an impressive list of publications and literary awards. There’s even a blood-seeping ghost story.
She writes, “At thirteen, in juvie for running away, I concluded that marriage would be my ticket to adulthood. At Al’s Drive-in the following year, I met Mark, a 16-year-old high school dropout. ‘If you don’t let me marry Mark, I’ll run away again or get pregnant. I’m not bluffing,’ I told my parents so many times that it became a sort of mantra. In September 1962, the week before I should have started ninth grade, Mark and I drove from Oakland, Calif., to Reno with my mother in the backseat.
This one is definitely beach worthy; you’ll turn the pages faster than sand can settle in the book’s seam.
*** What’s on Your Nightstand or Kindle?
4. THE STORYBOARD
*** “Senior Surprise: Getting Switched with Little Warning Into Medicare Advantage,” by Susan Jaffe, Kaiser Health News (July 26): “Only days after Judy Hanttula came home from the hospital after surgery last November, her doctor’s office called with bad news: Records showed that instead of traditional Medicare, she had a private Medicare Advantage plan, and her doctor and hospital were not in its network. Neither the plan nor Medicare now would cover her medical costs. She owed $16,622.”
Jaffe reports that when Hanttula, of Carlsbad, N.M., became eligible for Medicare, her insurer, Blue Cross Blue Shield, automatically signed her up for its own Medicare Advantage. The plan informed her by letter, but because she believed she was in traditional Medicare, she discarded the correspondence with other unopened junk mail.
The article explains that Medicare’s is allowing some health insurers to “enroll a member of its marketplace or other commercial plan into its Medicare Advantage coverage when that individual becomes eligible for Medicare.” They only need to notify the person of the “seamless conversion” by mail. Rep. Jan Schakowsky, D-Ill., is seeking stronger consumer protections.
*** “AP Exclusive: Pricey Drugs Overwhelm Medicare Safeguard,” by Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar, Associated Press/Seattle Times (July 25): “A safeguard for Medicare beneficiaries has become a way for drugmakers to get paid billions of dollars for pricey medications at taxpayer expense, government numbers show. The cost of Medicare’s “catastrophic” prescription coverage jumped by 85 percent in three years, from $27.7 billion in 2013 to $51.3 billion in 2015, according to the program’s number-crunching Office of the Actuary.”
*** “Nursing Home Residents Still Vulnerable to Abuse,” Editorial Board, New York Times (July 25): Based on its recent investigative reporting, the Times opines, “Federal rules to be finalized soon fail to hold nursing homes truly accountable to patients, their families or the law. At issue are arbitration clauses in nursing home contracts that require consumers to settle any disputes that arise over products or services through private arbitration rather than through lawsuits.”
The editorial emphasizes, “Corporations of all sorts love forced arbitration because it overwhelmingly tilts in their favor and shields them from liability. But in the process, it denies justice to consumers, investors, patients and others who find they have no legal recourse when wronged. Forced arbitration is especially problematic in nursing home disputes, which are generally about care, not money . . . . Typical claims involve neglect or abuse leading to broken limbs, dehydration and untreated pain.”
However, the Times continues, “The proposals, by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, should have banned pre-dispute arbitration clauses in nursing home contracts. Instead, they basically condone them as long as these homes take some legalistic steps to explain and disclose the clauses and do not make signing them a condition of admission. Those provisions skirt the real problem. Prospective patients do not have the necessary information to make a decision about signing the clauses.”
*** “Here’s How The GOP Is Concealing Its Plans To Cut Social Security,” by Daniel Marans, Huffington Post (July 20): “Slippery language hides an agenda that contradicts Donald Trump’s claim that he will protect benefits.”
*** Two on Working Longer from the Minneapolis StarTribune: “Will You Really Be Able to Work into Your 70s?” by Chris Farrell (July 26): “Many need or want to. Here’s what may be necessary to do it.” And “Get Back to Work! Working Past ‘Retirement Age’ is Beneficial,” by Katy Read, (July 27): “Speakers at Age Boom Academy sounded the refrain: Working past the traditional retirement age is good for your mind, your body and the economy.”
*** Indie Public Radio Producer Karen Michel Aired Two Profiles of “older, majorly wonderful visual artists,” she e-mailed GBONews. “Artist June Leaf, Still Moving Fast At 86,” ran on NPR’s Weekend Edition (June 18); and “Overlooked But Undeterred, A 101-Year-Old Artist Finally Gets Her Due,” about Carmen Herrera, was on Weekend Edition Sunday (July 2). Both links go to both Michel’s audio stories and to the companion print articles with photos.
Leaf, like many women artists, was long overshadowed by her husband, the late photographer Robert Frank. (Think of Diego Rivera’s wife, Frieda Kahlo, unknown outside the art world until the late 1970s, when a group of artists, many of them Latino, posthumously promoted her work.)
Although the Cuban-born Herrera was part of the Paris art scene in the 1940s, even exhibiting her work next to Piet Mondrian, she didn’t make her first sale until she was 89. Now her work is exhibited at such places as MOMA and the Whitney in New York and the Tate in London. The Whitney recently held a retrospective of her work.
*** “Why Don’t Millennials Contribute to IRAs? They say they don’t understand them,” by Rodney Brooks, Washington Post (July 11): “Individual Retirement Accounts can be an important part of your retirement plan, especially if you don’t have an employer-sponsored 401(k) or 403(b). But the fifth annual TIAA IRA survey indicates that a surprising number of people don’t understand them, especially millennials. And of those who do understand them, many say they simply cannot afford to save another dime. It all translates into the need for more and better financial education, according to the folks at TIAA.”
Brook reports that the survey found 25 percent of poll participants said they do not know enough about IRAs, and 46 percent said they can’t save any more than they already do.” Although 35 percent of millennials said they don’t know enough about IRAs to consider using one, Gen X respondents “were more likely to say they didn’t have enough money to save more than they already do. That’s not surprising, says TIAA, because there are a many competing priorities for this group (ages 36 to 51).”
*** “Smart Financial Moves for Surviving Spouses,” by Jane Clark, Kiplinger’s Personal Finance (August 2016): “Here’s how one couple prepared for the worst and how one spouse coped with being a survivor.”
*** “Oral Health in California: What About Older Adults?” by Amber Cutler, Justice in Aging (JIA) (July 2016): Although focused on one state, this 10-page Issue Brief by Cutler, a senior staff attorney for JIA (formerly the National Senior Citizens Law Center) highlights a story needing to be amplified by reporters across the country. The issue brief notes, “While approximately half of all older adults 65 and older nationally have been to the dentist within the last year, this is only true for 37% of black and 38% of Hispanic older adults. Worse yet, only 30% of adults 65 and over with incomes below the Federal Poverty Level had a dental visit within the last year.”
Journalists on aging need to expose that senior oral health isn’t about mere “tooth decay” and flossing. Cutler writes, “Poor oral health has a substantial impact on the overall general health of older adults to a greater extent than for younger populations. Tooth decay and associated mouth pain make it difficult to eat, leading to weight loss and poor nutrition, which only exacerbate chronic conditions like hypertension, diabetes, and hyperlipidemia – conditions that individuals are more likely to acquire later in life. Poor oral health also leads to increased infections, which early research associates with
higher risk for heart and lung disease, suffering a stroke, and experiencing diabetic complications.” It can also disrupt sleep and trigger other causes of social isolation and depression.
Yet, dental care receives only spotty coverage by Medicare and Medicaid in the stingy-wise, dollar-foolish federal and state eldercare programs.
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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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