GBO NEWS: 20 Tapped as Journalists in Aging Fellows; “Old School” Launched vs Ageism; Stephen Colbert’s Midlife -isms; High Rents Burden 78% of Low-Income CA Seniors; Medicare-for-All $10 Trillion Cheaper; & MORE
GENERATIONS BEAT ONLINE NEWS
E-News of the Journalists Network on Generations– Celebrating 25 Years.
September 25, 2018 — Volume 18, Number 10
EDITOR’S NOTE: GBONews, e-news of the Journalists Network on Generations (JNG), publishes alerts for journalists, producers and authors covering generational issues. Send your news of important stories or books, fellowships, awards or pertinent kvetches to GBO News Editor Paul Kleyman. To subscribe to GBONews.org at no charge, simply sending a request to Paul with your name, address, phone number and editorial affiliation or note that you freelance. For each issue, you’ll receive the table of contents in an e-mail, so just click through to the full issue at www.gbonews.org. GBONews does not provide its list to other entities.
In This Issue: The Middle-Aged Comeback of the Year.
1. EYES ON THE PRIZE: ***20 Tapped for Journalists in Aging Fellowships.
2. GEN BEATLES NEWS: ***GBONews Saddened by Death of GSA’s Greg O’Neil;
***CMS Admits Care Denial Exposed by Susan Jaffe for KHN/NPR;
***ProPublica’sPeter Gosselin Named Senior Fellow at CUNY’s Brookdale Center for Healthy Aging;
***BostonColumnist Richard Griffin Retires at 90;
***Unretired Author Chris Farrell Honored Among Minnesota’s“50 Over 50.”
3. UNPRODUCTIVE AGEISM: ***Anti-Ageism “Old School” Clearinghouse Launched; ***Stephen Colbert’s Midlife -isms;***Ageism’s Employment ‘Sell-By’ Date, by Swapna Venugopal Ramaswamy, Rockland-Westchester Journal News/USA Today; ***Adrienne Rich on Accounting for Every Year.
4. GOOD SOURCES: ***UCLA Study–Three-Quarters of Low-Income Older Californian Tenants Rent Burdened.
5. THE STORYBOARD: *** “We’re Asking the Wrong Question About Medicare-for-All,” by Paul Waldman, Washington Post “Plum Line” blog;
*** “Stereotype, Asian-Americans Face Worse Retirement Crisis Than Whites,” by Christian Weller, Forbes;
*** Rep. Tom Reed, Hospice Volunteer and Under Appreciated Difficulty Hospice Family Caregiver for Hospice Patients, both by Larry Beresford, The Lancet’s United States of Health U.S. blog;
*** On Spirituality, Boomers Changing Paths, by Robert Weisman, Boston Globe;
*** “U.S. Lags Many Developed Countries on Retirement Security,” by Irina Ivanova, CBSN MoneyWatch.
1. EYES ON THE PRIZE
***20 Tapped for Journalists in Aging Fellowships: Twenty reporters were named as 2018-19 Journalists in Aging Fellows by the Journalists Network on Generations, publisher of GBONews.org, and the Gerontological Society of America (GSA). The reporters represent a wide range of general audience, ethnic and community media outlets, including public radio affiliates, metropolitan dailies and national media outlets. This year’s fellowship group brings the program’s total number of participating reporters over its nine years to 156.
The new fellows were chosen by a panel of gerontological and editorial professionals based on their proposals for an in-depth aging-focused story or series. These projects, to be produced in the coming year, span such concerns as retirement security, preventing debilitating falls, suicide among older adults and immigration policies.
The participating journalists will convene during GSA’s 2018 Annual Scientific Meeting — scheduled for November 14-18 in Boston, Mass. There, they will have access to the latest aging research and approximately 4,000 expert attendees to help inform their reporting. The fellowship program is supported by grants from AARP, The Silver Century Foundation, The Retirement Research Foundation, The Commonwealth Fund, and The John A. Hartford Foundation.
In Boston, the fellows also will participate in a daylong educational workshop, where researchers and public policy experts will discuss post-election expectations and underlying trends and insights on key issues facing an aging America. Continuing fellowship grants also are being provided to allow 16 previous fellows to participate in the meeting. A continuously updated list of almost 600 stories generated by the program’s alumni is available at www.geron.org/journalistfellows.
The new fellows:
Rodney A. Brooks (USA Today) — Project: “Aging While Black”: Health, retirement prospects and finances of aging African Americans.
Kevyn Burger (Minneapolis Star Tribune) — Project: The devastating financial impact of frontotemporal dementia.
Laura Castañeda, EdD (NBC Latino) — Project: Latest research about aging Latinos in the U.S., and model programs and interventions for helping them.
Cassie M. Chew (Chicago Reporter) — Project: Older ex-offenders facing barriers to community reintegration.
Richard Eisenberg (Next Avenue) — Project: What can be learned from residents of the world’s high-longevity “Blue Zones” to ensure their money lasts through their increasing life expectancy.
Elizabeth Fite (Chattanooga Times Free Press) — Project: Suicide and its prevention among Tennessee seniors.
Lisa V. Gillespie (WFPLNews Louisville) — Project: Series on medical malpractice; racial and income disparities for Medicaid long-term care patients; the rural eldercare gap; older minority women working longer; and aging with hunger.
Mariel Toni Jimenez (Positively Filipino) — Project: Changes in Filipino family relationships following the death of a loved one.
Chunxiang Jin (World Journal) — Project: Chinese-language coverage of post-military life of Chinese American veterans.
Xavier Juan Jones (Telegram Newspaper) — Project: The effects of childhood stress on mental illness in African American aged 65 and older in the Detroit area.
Mary Kane (Kiplinger’s Retirement Report) — Project: Eldercare changes reflecting medical and scientific advances for cognitive stimulation, and the strengths that remain.
Shira Laucharoen (Sampan) — Project: Immigration stories of older Asians, and Asian models for independent living in Boston’s Chinatown.
Rhonda J. Miller (WKUPublic Radio) — Project: Older Kentucky residents facing challenges of language, hunger and isolation.
Christine Nguyen, MD (KALWPublic Radio) — Project: Vietnamese older adults with dementia in Northern California, and cultural aspects making coping it harder.
Brad Pomerance (Jewish Life Television) — Project: Mental health among Jewish seniors and dispelling the “Neurotic Jew” stereotype.
Samantha Díaz Roberts (MundoHispánico) — Project: New immigration policies and affecting older generations in the Atlanta area.
Viji Sundaram (India West) — Project: How ignorance and South Asiancultural beliefs keep many older Indian Americans from writing advance health care directives stating their end-or-life wishes.
David K. Walhberg (Wisconsin State Journal) — Project: Three-day series on falls. Why Wisconsin leads the U.S. rate of deadly falls and what the state is doing about it.
Cheryl Platzman Weinstock (New York Times) — Project: Under-recognized factors in older-adult suicides.
Peter White (Tennessee Tribune) — Project: Challenges facing African Americans aging in the South, including social isolation intensified by gentrification.
2. GEN BEATLES NEWS
*** GBONews Was Deeply Saddened by the Death of GSA’s Greg O’Neil, director of the Gerontological Society of America’s nonpartisan public policy institute, the National Academy on an Aging Society, where he also served as associate editor of GSA’s policy journal, Public Policy & Aging Report. O’Neill was involved in selecting the Journalists in Aging Fellows for the program’s past eight years, and was always available as an expert source-of-sources for reporters on a wide range of issues.
On staff at GSA since 1998, he was also the association’s “go-to person for Capitol Hill staffers working on aging-related issues,” according to GSA President & CEO James Appleby. He led many of GSA’s research projects including on civic engagement, social isolation and senior entrepreneurship (about which he testified before the U.S. Senate).
In addition, O’Neill, who held a PhD in sociology from Duke, founded GSA’s Aging Means Business initiative, a venture to spotlight breakthrough ideas, innovations and strategies for the 50-plus market. Last spring, the society included an interview with him in Gerontology News marking his 20th year on staff. Characteristic of O’Neill’s generous spirit, his wife, Anita Hattiangadi, asked, in lieu of flowers, that individuals consider a donation in his honor to NIH/NIH Children’s Inn, the Lombardi Cancer Center at Georgetown University, the Alzheimer’s Association, or another favorite charity. O’Neill, who succumbed from cancer, was 51.
*** Veteran Journalist Peter Gosselin Named Inaugural Senior Fellow at Hunter College’s Brookdale Center for Healthy Aging, part of the City University of New York. Gosselin is a contributing writer for ProPublica, which last March published, “Cutting ‘Old Heads’ at IBM,” the age-discrimination exposé he co-authored with Ariana Tobin of Mother Jones. Over his nearly half-century career, Gosselin has reported for the Los Angeles Times and Boston Globe among others, and authored High Wire: The Precarious Financial Lives of American Families (Basic, 2008).
Also, Gosselin was just named as one of 2018 PBS/Next Avenue’s12 Top Influencers in Aging. Among his previous honors have been two George Polk Awards, the Hillman Prize and the Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism.
In his new position, supported by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, “Gosselin will build on previous work to produce data-driven enterprise news coverage of the forces shaping the lives of Americans ages 50, 60 and beyond with an eye to revealing where arrangements limit people’s opportunities or fail to serve both individuals and the broader society,” according to a release from the Brookdale center. In addition to his journalistic duties, Gosselin will help develop public forums, collaborative research and joint policy analysis, as well as mentor students.
In addition to being a journalist, Gosselin was chief speechwriter to the Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner during the 2008-2009 financial crisis, a member of the original implementation team for the Affordable Care Act and a visiting fellow at the Urban Institute.
***Susan Jaffe Got an Official Acknowledgement from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) that her January 2018 story exposing wrongful care denials of seriously chronically ill patients by home health agencies is, indeed, a concern. In her reporting, a CMS spokesperson had denied there was a difficulty getting and keeping home health services, “Home Care Agencies Often Wrongly Deny Medicare Help To The Chronically Ill,” was published by Kaiser Health News and NPR. But this summer, CMS acknowledged the issue and cited facts unique to her story in its 600-page proposed regulatory update on health home payments for 2019.
In the obscure annals of government admissions of culpability, of course, Jaffe’s investigation isn’t mentioned by name. It reads, “News stories and anecdotal reports indicate that Medicare patients with chronic conditions may be encountering difficulty in accessing home health care.”
It continues, “The news stories referenced an individual with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, and the difficulties encountered in finding Medicare home health care.” Jaffe noted in an email that the federal document, which proposes rule changes for the coming year, devotes eight pages to explaining how additional payments are available for the extra services involved in caring for the average ALS patient in the Los Angeles area (where the ALS patient featured in my story, lives).” Policy wonks can click here. To read the proposed regulations. Search for “Lou Gehrig.”
*** Boston-area Columnist Richard Griffin Retires with 90th Birthday: After nearly three decades of writing his column on aging for the Cambridge (Mass.) Chronicle, gen-beatle Richard Griffin announced his retirement in August, the very week he turned 90.
In a warm profile of him, writer Amy Saltzman reported in Cambridge’s online Wicked Local (Aug. 16), “Last month, Chronicle columnist Richard Griffin wrote fondly of Mr. Rogers, the Presbyterian-minister-turned-TV -star, who taught children about the importance of love and patience as they navigate their surroundings. The world, Griffin wrote, needs Mr. Rogers now more than ever.But the same could be said for Griffin, a former-Jesuit-priest-turned-writer who has spent the better part of the last three decades helping elders navigate aging through his bimonthly Chronicle column, ‘Growing Older.’” Griffin has archived over 900 of his columns on his website.
The son of a Boston Post editor, Griffin attended Harvard College until leaving in his sophomore year to join the Jesuits. Saltzman continued, “He would eventually return to Harvard to serve as the Catholic Chaplain from 1968 to 1975, a time of ‘unprecedented ferment in both church and university,’ he said.” In the latter role, he was an outspoken and controversial supporter of student opposition to the Vietnam War. In the wake of the Second Vatican Council reforms, Griffin decided to leave the priesthood.
Griffin wanted to write more and pursue other interests, particularly the field of aging. From 1977-85, he directed the Cambridge Council on Aging.
Saltzman quotes his self-published 2012 memoir, Becoming Merely Human: A Spiritual Journey to Imperfection, “In the years since I entered the Jesuits, I had abandoned perfection in favor of becoming merely human . . . With humanness as a base, I could continue to grow in interior freedom, even in the face of the ills that old age typically brings. I saw myself not as standing alone, but rather as located in the sequence of generations.”
In 1976, he married former nun, Susan Keane, a now-retired French professor at Simmons College. Their daughter, Emily, born in 1980, is now an editor at HarperCollins.
In Saltzman’s article, Griffin reflects, “Looking into the mirror and seeing my face marked by deepening wrinkles, I am continually astonished. ‘Can that person be me,’ I ask, ‘when that image seems so at odds with what I am feeling about myself?’ I know that I have been gifted in length of years, compared to most people who have ever lived, and I want to find whatever fulfillment is available to me. I will continue to cherish those moments when my life is revealed as more than it seemed to be.” His email contact is rbgriff180@aol.com.
***Journalist and Unretired Author Chris Farrell will be honored on Oct. 10 among “the most inspiring and accomplished leaders from across Minnesota.” The occasion, to held in Minneapolis, will assemble the state’s 2018 50 Over 50 . . . “who have made significant contributions and achievements in their communities,” according to the program’s website. The project of AARP Minnesota and the nonprofit PollenMidwest lists individuals from a wide range of communities and fields.
Farrell, 59, is a senior economics contributor to American Public Media’s “Marketplace” and a commentator on economic issues for Minnesota Public Radio, as well as a newspaper columnist. Author of Unretirement: How Baby Boomers are Changing the Way We Think About Work, Community, and the Good Life(Bloomsbury Press, 2015), he “has spent his career calling attention to important financial issues and acting as a trusted guide to saving for retirement, investing wisely, navigating Social Security, and more,” according to the awards site. He also hosts “Conversations on the Creative Economy,” a discussion series that highlights successful businesses owned by seniors, women, and people of color—all to inspire diverse entrepreneurs of all ages.
Also to receive kudos for their contributions in journalism will be Joel and Laurie Kramer, who founded MinnPost, a leading post-recession regional nonprofit news site in the U.S. Both “retired” from their previous gigs in their 50s before, ands, working out of their home, set sail with the news venture in 2007. Previously, Joel has been editor and later publisher of the Minneapolis Star Tribune. He has also edited two investigative projects to won Pulitzer Prizes.
Laurie, notes the 50 Over 50 website, “offered a lifetime of experience in nonprofit work, including the founding of an annual mental health conference.” She currently chairs the MinnPost board development committee and produces MinnRoast, MinnPost’s main fundraiser “and one of our state’s most entertaining political evenings,” says the award site. Both are now age 70, and Joel remains on the MinnPost board, coaching both the CEO and editor who succeeded him.
3. UNPRODUCTIVE AGEISM
*** “Old School Is Now in Session!” (with an exclamation), says This Chair Rocks author and blogger, Ashton Applewhite of her new venture, Old School, “a clearinghouse of free and carefully vetted resources to educate people about ageism and help dismantle it.” The program aims to be a repository of blogs, books, articles, videos, speakers, and other tools (workshops, handouts, curricula, etc.) accessible to the public. (GBONews’ editor is pleased to be listed among the speakers.)
Applewhite states in her online launch announcement, “Our goal is to help catalyze a movement to make ageism (discrimination on the basis of age) as unacceptable as any other kind of prejudice.” Old School, she declares, seeks to include sources that are “not about positive aging or productive aging or healthy aging or conscious aging or creative aging, but explicitly focused on ageism.”
There has been an ongoing critique of well-meaning notions of “successful aging” and the like, which too easily lend themselves to bland kumbayas or retirement-finance company commercials. Presumably, any project to change a prevailing social narrative should also be charged with seeking new models for change, not merely an academically approved “reframing” of aging by way of more positive talking points, phrases and buzzwords. These may be useful, of course. Generally, such efforts begin with the goal of countering the prevailing and ageist narrative of old age as a burden and cost to family and society.
Before long, though, well-meaning, even effective terms of revision, say, the late Dr. Robert N. Butler’s“productive aging,” have found their way into notions that perhaps older people have a personal responsibility to become “productive” or age successfully, as if anyone in the later years would not vulnerable to illness or impoverishment for reasons beyond his or her control.
Butler, who coined the term “ageism,” fervently argued against any such twist of his well-documented intent, particularly interpretations that might be used, for instance, to argue for financial means testing of old-age supports, such as Social Security and Medicare, lest public assistance go to those deemed irresponsible and undeserving for not having saved enough to take care of themselves. Still, the push back of anti-ageism efforts can only go so far without some forward thrust toward new language and recast attitudes about late life. As the man with the pointy ears said, “Live long, and prosper.”
*** Stephen Colbert’s Midlife -isms: And then there’s 50-something Stephen Colbert’s mostly brilliant satirizing of the 11 GOP senators on the judiciary committee during the hearings on Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. But then Colbert defaulted to deriding them as “old, white men.” It’s been curious to me how linguistically lazy nearly every commentator has been across the political spectrum, even political progressives, in so readily adopting his racial and gender-biased trope. To be sure, bulk of power brokers in our largely patriarchal culture are older, white and male. But so are lefty humanists Sen. Bernie Sandersand, say, radical social critic Noam Chomsky. A weakness of identity politics is that they tend to swing both ways.
So, “old, white men”—what’s the harm when all that’s at stake is a comedy setup to a punchline? How much ugly tinder does a society need over how much time to incite and ignite justifying more of the same? GBONews invites our readers to get creative with more discerning and functionally descriptive and non-prejudicial turns of satirical exposure.
*** “A ‘Sell-By’ Date for Employees? Fixing Ageism and Rethinking Retirement in the Workplace,” by Swapna Venugopal Ramaswamy, Rockland/Westchester Journal News/USA Today (Aug. 30): According to the story, “Last year marked the 50th anniversary of the Age Discrimination in Employment Act, which protects individuals over the age of 40 from discrimination in employment. A half-century later, age discrimination in the workplace remains notoriously hard to prove. Of the 18,376 cases filed with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in 2017, only 2.2 percent were found to have a ‘reasonable cause.’”
This difficulty was worsened by a 2009 U.S. Supreme Court rulingthat an employee must prove age was a deciding factor, such as in passing him or her over for promotions or in forcing the worker’s departure. This reversed the High Court’s previous stance. For instance, an employer’s presumption of business-cost savings, the court held, is an allowable defense. So the onus of proof that age-discrimination occurred is entirely on the older plaintiff regardless of other factors, arguable or not.
The story cites the ProPublica/Mother Jones exposé of IBM’s widespread age discrimination mentioned elsewhere in this issue of GBONews. In targeting older American employees for layoffs since 2013, the investigative story found cases affecting more than 20,000 employees ages 40-plus in the U.S. (IBM denied the allegations.)
The USA Today story quotes Carol Evans, chief relationship officer of Respectful Exits, “How we shift the individual and corporate mindset around employees who want to and need to work beyond their mid-60s is going to be a huge societal issue over the next decades.” The national nonprofit works with corporations on retirement issues.
Respectful Exits’ founder and CEO Paul Rupert told Ramaswamy that companies should eliminate any retirement age. Rupert emphasized, “Even when companies get rid of their formal retirement age, you are informed with relentless repetition, starting at age 62, that you have reached your sell-by date and it’s time for you to look elsewhere.” He and Evans urge companies and public agencies to begin phased retirement programs both to ease their way into retirement, instead of “falling off the cliff” after decades of work, and also to maintain institutional memory while often mentoring younger workers.
The USA Today piece also cites Charles Jeszeck, who oversees retirement and pension research for the Government Accountability Office: “It’s not just the private sector. If you look at other parts of the system, we are facing significant solvency challenges. By 2034, we’ll only be able to pay three-quarters of all benefits . . . . If you look at state and local pension plans, some of them are facing very serious solvency problems. In a broader sense, there are significant challenges that we’re going to have to face up to ensure an adequate retirement for everyone.”
***Adrienne Rich on Accounting for Every Year: And now for something more complicated.In her New York Times review of poet and essayistAdrienne Rich’s posthumously published new collection of her Essential Essays, Parul Sehgal wrote that for Rich, “a thinking life, a political commitment, does not mean achieving perfect awareness — call it wokeness or whatever else — but embarking on ‘a long turbulence.’ It is a perpetual ‘moving into accountability,’ never an arrival. ‘By 1956, I had begun dating each of my poems by year. I did this because I was finished with the idea of a poem as a single, encapsulated event,’ she wrote. ‘I knew my life was changing, my work was changing, and I needed to indicate to readers my sense of being engaged in a long, continuing process.’”
Rich, in her wisdom, stressed, “’We can’t wait to speak until we are perfectly clear and righteous. There is no purity and, in our lifetimes, no end to this process.”
4. GOOD SOURCES
*** “More Than Three-Quarters of Low-Income Older Californian Tenants Are Rent Burdened,” says a recent fact sheet from UCLA’s Center for Health Policy Research (August 2018). The UCLA summary release) reports the study found that 78.4 percent of the Golden State’s more than half-million older, low-income renters are under a moderate-to-severe rent burden. Many, says the report, “can be forced to move far from their established social and medical networks to find rentals they can afford; they may end up in substandard housing; or — at worst — homeless.”
Researcher and publication co-author D. Imelda Padilla-Frausto, added, “Older Californians with limited incomes struggle to pay for shelter, food, medical care and other basic necessities. Escalating rent prices can push them out the door. If they’re lucky, they can land at a relative or friend’s home.”
According to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, a rent level of half or more of pre-tax income as a “severe burden.” Those paying 30-50 percent of a household’s pretax income have a “moderate burden.” (HUD Secretary Ben Carson, might say, “What, me burdened?” But your editor digresses.)
According to UCLA’s study, 55.8 percent of low-income seniors in California shoulder a severe rent burden and 22.6 percent are moderately burdened. The analysis is based on uses the most currently available census data, the 2016 American Community Survey. The report compares rental burden in seven regions and major counties of the state.
The study’s lead author, Steven P. Wallace, associate director of the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research, said, “The gap between many older adults’ fixed incomes and increasing rents is likely to widen to a chasm unless changes occur in rental costs, incomes or both.”
5. THE STORYBOARD
*** “We’re Asking the Wrong Question About Medicare-for-All,” by Paul Waldman, Washington Post “Plum Line” blog (Sept. 20): Waldman’s opinion piece takes on the stock trope of mainstream media journalists such as CNN’s Jake Tapper, who press the question of how Medicare-for-all advocates propose to pay its projected $40 trillion bill over 10 years. On “State of the Union,” New York Democratic congressional candidate Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez“answered by saying that other countries manage to sustain universal systems, and it is an investment that will continue bringing dividends.” Tapper, wrote Waldman, countered, “You say it’s not pie in the sky, but $40 trillion is quite a bit of money…”
Waldman: “So let me suggest a different question that might be asked not to those advocating Medicare-for-all, but to those opposing it and those journalists assuming it is unrealistic: How do you propose to come up with the $50 trillion you want to spend on health care over the next 10 years? This $50 trillion number comes from the most recent projections by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
Waldman adds, while emphasizing that the United States spends far more on health care than any other country, “So if Medicare-for-all actually costs $40 trillion, we would save $10 trillion. Hooray!”
*** “Stereotype, Asian-Americans Face Worse Retirement Crisis Than Whites,” by Christian Weller, Forbes (Sept. 18): Weller,of the University of Massachusetts Boston and Center for American Progress, writes: “America’s families face a looming retirement crisis and it is worse for Asian-Americans and other communities of color than for whites. Millions of Asian-Americans work in low paid jobs located in high priced communities, but without benefits.” He notes, “The growth in the income disparity is partially due to decades of stagnation in income levels for Asian-Americans in the bottom income brackets.”
*** “Congressman Tom Reed Serves as a Hospice Patient Care Volunteer” and “The Underappreciated Difficulty of the Family Caregiver for Hospice Patients,” both by Larry Beresford, The Lancet’s United States of Health U.S. blog (Aug., 31): Rep. Tom Reed, R-N.Y., experienced his first personal encounter with hospice in 1998, when his mother was dying of cancer in the family home in Corning, N.Y.” For over nine months, “Reed, the youngest of 12 kids, served as his mother’s primary caregiver. She died in his arms,” Beresford wrote.
The story notes, “The Hospice in America has grown from its volunteer roots in the 1970s to a $17 billion industry with nearly 4,400 hospices, two-thirds of them for-profit companies. It now cares for 1.4 million Medicare beneficiaries per year. A new report from the federal Office of Inspector General has concluded that the U.S. hospice industry is vulnerable to fraud, and that some patients have received poor and/or unnecessary care.”
Beresford leads with second story with, “Hospices aren’t doing enough to communicate to families all that is entailed in caring for a terminally ill loved one at home, says Debra Parker Oliver, PhD, a social worker and professor of family and community medicine at the University of Missouri’s School of Medicine in Columbia, MO.”
*** “On Matters of Spirituality, Baby Boomers Are Changing Paths and Writing Their Own Scripts,” by Robert Weisman, Boston Globe (Aug. 4):“While some have left the churches or synagogues of their youth, others have returned after long hiatuses. They can recall growing up in communities with strong civic organizations, and some now seek to reconnect with that sense of community as traditional touchstones like fraternal clubs and bowling leagues have faded. … Rabbi Moshe Waldoks, 69, senior rabbi at Temple Beth Zion in Brookline, said the ritual of attending religious services or observing Shabbat, the Jewish sabbath, can be like a “booster shot” to older people.
Waldoks, while firmly planted in the Jewish tradition, also sees great value in blending elements of Buddhist wisdom and practice, including meditation. The rabbi, who jokingly refers to himself as a “JuBu,” said the aim is to focus on being, not doing. “When you get older, there’s an openness to a spiritual life that perhaps wasn’t there when you were younger,” Waldoks said. “People are looking for a framework for living their lives. . . . We’re looking for interconnectedness. If you can somehow diminish your ego-driven personality, you begin to feel more humble. And that helps you have room for other people.”
Incidentally, Waldoks is not just any “JuBu.” He was one of four leading American rabbis on the groundbreaking 1990 journey to meet with the Dalai Lama in Dharamsala, India. The group included the late Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, who later defined spiritual eldering, and two others. The Dalai Lama wanted to understand more of how the Jews had survived for so long as a people in exile. The story of this fascinating expedition was told by Roger Kamanetz in his book and the PBS documentary, The Jew in the Lotus (Harper San Francisco, 1994).
*** “U.S. Lags Many Developed Countries on Retirement Security,” by Irina Ivanova, CBSN MoneyWatch, (Sept. 6): She reports that for global retirement security, the Natixis Global Retirement Index, which ranks 25 developed nations annually, “puts the U.S. in the middle of the pack, outpaced by countries like Switzerland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden. At No. 16, the U.S. did slightly better than its 2017 ranking and beat out the U.K., Malta, France and Japan.” The story adds that the survey “gave the U.S. high marks for material well-being and its financial system. But declining life expectancy and high health care costs hurt the final ranking.”
Ivanova quotes the Index report saying that the U.S. “has the highest score for the health expenditure per capita indicator yet is in danger of being in the bottom ten for life expectancy.” It adds, “Meanwhile, the amount spent on healthcare per person for Chile, Czech Republic and Cyprus combined is less than two-thirds of what the U.S. spends, yet all three of these countries have a higher life expectancy.”
What the story doesn’t quite say is that the operations seem successful, even if the aging patients are dying early.
*** “A Public School That Not Only Keeps Children Safe, But Heals,” by Suzanne Bohan, Nonprofit Quarterly (Aug. 3): The article is adapted from her new book, Twenty Years of Life: Why the Poor Die Earlier and How to Challenge Inequity (Island Press, 2018): “After the mass shootings at a high school in Parkland, Florida earlier this year, schools are at the epicenter of national debates on gun violence and mental health. How can teachers and administrators deal with troubled students? And how can they make schools safer for all?”
In this intergenerational adapted chapter, Bohan, a longtime age-beat writer based in the San Francisco area, examines the dark side of the American dream: “Your health is largely determined by your zip code. The strain of living in a poor neighborhood, with sub-par schools, lack of parks, fear of violence, few to no healthy food options, and the stress of unpaid bills is literally taking years off people’s lives. The difference in life expectancy between wealthy and distressed neighborhoods can be as much as 20 years.”
While President Donald J. Trump, the NRA and others advocate for arming teachers and recruiting former police and military personnel for school duty, Bohan highlights successful “trauma-informed” schools, such as Cherokee Point Elementary in San Diego.
She explains, “Trauma-informed schools were inspired by the American Journal of Preventive Medicine’s groundbreaking 1998 Adverse Childhood Experience (ACE) Study, which found devastating long-term effects from traumatic experiences such as abuse, neglect, and close encounters with substance abuse and domestic violence.”
By the way, subsequent research has shown that the effects last for decades, even into late life. Also, on the ACE Study, see The Deepest Well: Healing the Long-Term Effects of Childhood Adversity (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018), by Nadine Burke Harris, MD, MPH, founder of the Center for Youth Wellness, a free clinic in San Francisco’s largely African American Bayview-Hunter’s Point. She writes that childhood trauma “can alter the way DNA is read and how cells replicate, and it can dramatically increase the risk for heart disease, stroke, cancer diabetes—and Alzheimer’s.”
The Journalists Network on Generations (JNG), founded in 1993, publishes Generations Beat Online News (GBONews.org). JNG provides information and networking opportunities for journalists covering generational issues, but not those representing services, products or lobbying agendas. Copyright 2018 JNG. For more information contact GBO Editor Paul Kleyman.
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