GBO NEWS: Homeless Over 50; Online “Medicare for All” Comparison Tool; Mark Miller’s New Podcast; Applewhite’s Anti-Ageism “Compact” in The Guardian; Opioids, Elders & ERs; Gold at 95, Ferlinghetti, 100; & MORE
GENERATIONS BEAT ONLINE NEWS
E-News of the Journalists Network on Generations – Celebrating 26 Years.
March 13, 2019 — Volume 26, Number 3
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 (by you and others), 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: In Washington’s Pot of Gold—Corned Beef, Cabbage, Indictments?
1. GEN BEATLES NEWS: *** Mark Miller Joins Podcast People; *** Ashton Applewhite Touring With New Edition of This Chair Rocks; *** Happy & Healing 95th Birthday to novelist/memoirist/journalist Herbert Gold, and 100th for Lawrence Ferlinghetti.
2. FISCAL REFORM SCHOOL: *** “Medicare for All” – What the Hell Is It?A New Interactive Tool for Comparing Plans; *** Business Insider’s Bob Bryan Gets Key Fact Wrong on NPR Weekend Edition (Hint: Social Security Barred By Law from Adding to U.S. Debt)
3. THE SLOWDOWN: “Our Dead Friend,” by Alicia Suskin Ostriker, featured poem on public radio/interstitial podcast, The Slowdown, with U.S. Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith.
4. THE STORYBOARD
*** “Aging Onto the Street,”(Homelessness Can Start at 50) by Kevin Fagan, San Francisco Chronicle;
*** “Increasing Rates of Opioid Misuse Among Older Adults Visiting Emergency Departments,” Towson University Study, GSA/Oxford Academic;
*** “Bereavement Researcher: We Must Do Better for the Grief-Stricken,” by Kevyn Burger, PBS Next Avenue;
*** “Quality of Life Enhanced for Seniors with Companion Animals,” by D. Kevin McNeir, The Washington Informer;
*** “Changing How We Age,” by Peter McDermott, Irish Echo;
*** “Vietnamese Death Anniversaries Unite Young and Old,”by Christine Nguyen, MD, KALW Public Radio “Crosscurrents”;
*** “Age-Friendly Universities: Colleges are making dramatic changes to attract older students,” by Liz Seegert, Considerable.com.
1. GEN BEATLES NEWS
*** Mark Miller Joins Pod People: Chicago-based author and retirement columnist Miller (Reuters, NY Times) has audio-fied his newsletter with a new podcast at RetirementRevised.com. He told GBONews he aims to present a range of interesting voices in the field to take a wider “holistic view” of aging, rather than that of other “vertical” podcasts on the topic that more narrowly center on such topic areas as late-life careers or investing.
Although most of the conversations will run about 30 minutes, he’s also planning to post 15-minute versions for the muy busy. His March 11 podcast featured Elizabeth White, author of 55, Underemployed, and Faking Normal, about her traumatic experience of job loss at midlife. He headlined another, “Jill Schlesinger on four ways smart people wreck their retirement” (March 1) with the CBS News business commentator (“Jill on Money”) and author.
For Miller’s initial podcast he interviewed Nancy Altman, co-founder of Social Security Works (@SSWorks) about the Democratic Party’s evolution on social-insurance reform, the current state of privatization thinking and the balance between Social Security and private saving. Miller is also working up a new book for Spring 2020 that he hopes will inject some elder consciousness into the presidential debates. He’s being a bit coy on the exact topic, so watch this space for more about that.
Miller is promoting the new podcast for a $120/year subscription fee for 48 issues. But,he is offering comp subscriptions to journalists. Drop him a note requesting to be on the list at @mark@retirementrevised.com. Say you saw his invite in GBONews.org.
*** Ashton Applewhite is traipsing hither and yon on book tour with the final release this month of the new big-publisher edition of her book, This Chair Rocks: A Manifesto Against Ageism, from Celadon Books. For info on the book and an up-to-date itinerary, check her This Chair Rocks website. (She’ll be at San Francisco’s Institute on Aging this Friday, March 15, 7 p.m.)
GBONews especially wants to note Applewhite’s recent essay, “How Did Old People Become Political Enemies of the Young?” in The Guardian(Dec. 23, 2018): Calling the piece “a New Generational Compact,” she wrote that these days, pitting old against young is considered good politics by some. That was recently exemplified by Democratic mid-term campaign ad sarcastically depicting older conservatives telling young people, “Don’t vote,” because it’s futile to complain about climate change, racism and other issues. The attempt to ridicule seniors as those who would gain from voting at the expense of the young, Applewhite reports, was chosen by Adweek as an Ad of the Day. “It’s satire,” she stressed, “But it’s hateful.”
Applewhite continued, “Racism, misogyny and homophobia remain alive and well in this country, but at least they no longer get a pass. It’s time to add ageism to the list of prejudices we no longer tolerate, and to deny it a foothold in our political discourse.”
It’s not only an American phenomenon, she wrote. “The invective and contempt that we’re used to seeing the alt-right show towards immigrants and women is being hurled at olders without an apparent second thought.” Applewhite prefers the term “olders” to “elders” or “seniors,” and although GBONews is not persuaded on that score, this editor firmly agrees with her statement, “Olders are not ‘them,’ they are us: our parents, our neighbors, our friends, and it is grotesque to suggest that our interests are inherently opposed.”
She continued, “Above all, old v. young framing plays right into the hands of the forces and institutions that also benefit from racial, gender and economic inequality. It is critically important to see the headlines that blame climate change or our kleptocratic Congress on ‘old people’ for what they are: a distraction from the underlying social and economic issues that affect the entire 99%. Income inequality does not discriminate by age.”
In addition, she said, “We need pathfinders and mapmakers of all stripes, to help create the more compassionate and interdependent society we all hope to live long enough to inhabit: a world that enables participation and purpose lifelong, where basic human rights do not expire.”
*** Here’s to a Happy & Healing 95th Birthday(March 9) to novelist/memoirist/journalist Herbert Gold. Herb is on the mend with a cracked hip, but he’s been recovering well, if slowly, according to his daughter. We hope the arrival of his second great-grandbaby also this month, will cheer him up to the bone. GBO’s editor had the privilege of dining with him in January at his currently favorite Poke place here in San Francisco, just a walk down a few blocks from his “Beatnik hovel” he’s had since 1960 on Russian Hill. Those interested in a brush with 20thcentury literary history may enjoy reading last year’s Paris Review interview with Herb by retired Washington Postwriter, Robert Kaiser.Meanwhile, March 24 will mark the 100thbirthday of San Francisco poet and painter Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Be sure to slap some mustard on your Coney Island mind.
2. FISCAL REFORM SCHOOL
*** “Medicare for All” – What the Hell Is It?One news story or pundit interview after another, such as on the PBS NewsHour’sMarch 11 “Politics Monday” segment, has couched it as an extreme (read as vaguely “politically unacceptable”) proposal in the Democratic Party’s Green New Deal. But variations among the M4A proposals range from the cautious to the comprehensive. The key issue for debate is the extent to which an M4A plan would involve or replace the private health-insurance industry—especially for-profit players. Some plans would, others not so much.
To compare the current congressional proposals, veteran health policy analyst Sara Collinsof the nonpartisan Commonwealth Fund has developed a new interactive tool for comparing what’s in the various bills. Each summary is also linked to the actual legislation, so you can see whose bill it is.
With the Fund’s “Medicare for All Continuum” tool, says their website, “You can see the extent to which the proposals would expand the public dimensions of our health insurance, or those aspects regulated or run by state and federal government. For example, do they rely on a mix of private and publicly funded health insurance, or do they feature public coverage only? You can also compare the benefits each coverage plan would provide, how people would pay for coverage and care, and how the bills would contain overall costs.”
*** “U.S. National Debt Passes $22 Trillion,” NPR Weekend Edition (Feb. 16, 2019): The usually astute host Scott Simonand his production staff stumbled, missing a key factual error, perhaps by simply assuming, as too often happens throughout mainstream media, that an economics writer from as presumably bottom-line a medium as Business Insiderdoesn’t have to be fact-checked. But there it was: Simon interviewed BIwriter Bob Bryanabout the fact that the national debt has surpassed $22 trillion.
Fairly soon the conversation turned to—guess!—Medicaid and Social Security. Simon deserves some credit for asking, “Do you see this deficit becoming politicized into an argument that entitlement programs like the ones you just mentioned should be slashed?”
And here’s where Bryan’s viewpoint exceeds the factual basis of any analysis: He responded, “So for years, politicians, especially in the Republican Party, have been saying that to get the debt under control, we need to address the big, long-term drivers of the debt. Those are Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid. [Emphasis added] But actually getting around to cutting those programs is pretty difficult because it is so politically unpopular.”
In addition, Commonwealth provides another interactive tool for comparing the health systems of other wealthy countries that shows where each one falls on the continuum from regulated public and private coverage to national insurance.
The problem: First, by law, Social Security is not allowed to contribute to the federal debt. Period. It’s an enclosed system with a wall (not a slat fence) erected between the program’s income and out-flow and the general budget. This is not a trivial technicality.
Since the early 1980s, conservatives have argued that federal borrowing from Social Security to cover other costs equates to rendering the national social-insurance program nothing but a pile of “I.O.U.s.” Bryan is free to adopt that or similar interpretations, but not to state it as an unqualified truth when it’s very much a matter of debate. The only operative fact is that the Social Security Act says, no, tapping into the program’s coffers for general spending is unlawful.
By the way, progressive economists uniformly observe that because Social Security has a surplus of $2.6 trillion in its trust fund, federal borrowing is done through special treasury bonds set at interest rates far lower than those the U.S. government would have to tap into on the international market. That is, borrowing from the Social Security Trust Fund actually saves money. Well, it “saves” to the extent that Washington spending is prudent in the first place rather than, say, for bridges to nowhere or an unfunded $2 trillion tax cut mostly for the very wealthy.
Those bonds are not incautiously tossed into a bottom drawer and forgotten. Like other bonds, they are redeemed by the government on a constant basis when due. To borrow more, the U.S. Treasury needs to issue new paper. That’s not, as righties have accused the system since the Reagan era, a “Ponzi scheme,” because payroll taxes actually continue flowing in from American workers making up the vast majority of as-you-go funding needed to cover obligations to retirees, people with disabilities, and family survivors. Whether he knows it or not, Bryan offered up false information. And if he doesn’t know, he shouldn’t be featured on NPR News interviews as an expert who does.
Bryan did at least bring up that there “actually is a growing school of thought that the debt isn’t as big of a deal as we’ve made it out to be.” He explains that proponents of Modern Monetary Theory hold that a big amount, such as $22 trillion, matters far less than “how it’s affecting the economy. And so right now, we’re still seeing a strong growth economy. The inflation is still low.”
Second, Simon stressed the fiscal drain of foreign wars. Bryan answered, “I certainly think that those are a large driver, but they don’t take up as big of a slice as a lot of the programs, the entitlement programs and the stuff that we do back home.” So, it all equates, right– Programs that provide for the nation’s old age versus spending that spreads out uncalculated costs in broken bodies, brain damage and emotional trauma?
Ah, well, back to the facts: Social Security cannot add to the national debt. It’s the law.
3. THE SLOWDOWN
Anyone else on the gen-beat want to get out of the Tweet-o-sphere for even minutes a day and back to, you know, thinking, maybe writing? We’ve been pleased to discover that U.S. Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith and the Library of Congress have seeded the internet and many public radio stations with The Slowdown. Each day, in five-minute podcast, Smith recites her selection of a poem, introducing each one in her clear and warm voice with observations about the importance and meaning of that day’s verses and their creator.
In particular, GBONews wanted interested readers to hear Smith read—or to read quietly for yourself–the poem “Our Dead Friend” by Alicia Suskin Ostriker. From her 2009 volume, The Book of Seventy (University of Pittsburgh Press), the poem begins:
Our dead friend used to say
when she reached menopause
the swamp cleared from her mind.
For Smith and American Public Media, though, a suggestion: Please start including a transcription of the Poet Laureate’s prefatory observations. Her intergenerational reflections about “Our Dead Friend” (Gen-Xer, Smith will turn 47 in April) begins by recalling that at 29 she heard 30 is the new 20, and at 40 that she was at the threshold of the new 30. She continues, “With luck my generations would enjoy a day when old age would suddenly be optional, something we could elect to forego, choosing instead to hover in a never-ending state of late youth. Now I’m not so sure I’d want that.”
Smith goes on, “Lately I’ve become conscious of the things I admire about my older friends, friends in the 50s or 60s or 70s. They’re the people I turn to for advice, the ones who make things like happiness or security or work-life balance seem easy. Their level of knowledge and skill is often what is meant by a phrase like ‘an artist at the height of her power.’ Best of all, they’re not hamstrung by the opinions of others. They’re free in a way I long to be free. And the only way to get there, I suspect, is to stop clinging to all this nonsense about stopping the clock.”
Ostriker’s “Our Dead Friend” is a marvelous appreciation of old age. As for Smith’s clock, there can be no stopping it, but perhaps the Apple Watches have an Einsteinian app to slow the heart rate for five minutes of word-time per weekday, and perhaps five more for penning your own time. Also, see her more recent volume, The Old Woman, the Tulip, and the Dog.
4. THE STORYBOARD
*** “Aging Onto the Street,”by Kevin Fagan, San Francisco Chronicle (March 8, 2019): Fagan continues his incisive coverage of homelessness, a project he began for the SF Chronicle about two decades ago, by updating his on-going sub-focus on aging on the streets. This latest package, a mainbar with three profiles, also echoes the extensive series on being 50-plus and homeless back in 2004.
The new story vividly opens, “For the past six years, Joe White has been waking up every morning in a parking lot in downtown Oakland. Some days, it’s freezing. Other days, he’s baking, drenched or, sometimes, tolerably comfortable. One constant is the asphalt: It’s always hard. And food, which White has to protect from the rats that squirm through the hole they’ve chewed through his tent door, always requires a hunt. But he’s OK, he says. He’s tough, and he has to be. He’s 68 years old.”
The news feature springboards off of the latest report by University of California, San Francisco researchers from their five-year study of 450 older homeless people in the Bay Area.Fagan wrote, “In a study that raises alarms about an increasingly tattered safety net for low-income seniors in America, researchers have found that just short of half — 44 percent — of all homeless people older than 50 years old hit the streets for the first time after they were 50.”
The story continues, “While a full half of the nation’s people living without homes are older than 50, it’s the growing number of those who fall into homelessness after that age that most concerns Margot Kushel, the UCSF professor who heads the study. The problem is especially acute in the Bay Area, where housing costs, including rents, have risen dramatically over the past decade. The study’s finding speaks to the danger of a shrinking ability of people to adequately save money and make other arrangements for retirement, Kushel said. And it indicates, she said, that there is too little help in place to catch them before they fall into homelessness when hard times hit. Perhaps most disturbingly, it reflects society’s ambivalence toward the plight of the elderly, she said.”
*** “Increasing Rates of Opioid Misuse Among Older Adults Visiting Emergency Departments,” by Mary W. Carter, PhD, and coauthors, Innovations in Aging(a journal of the Gerontological society of America/Oxford Academic, January 2019): According to Carter and her colleagues at Maryland’s Towson University, emergency department visits by those 65-plus who were identified with opioid misuse and dependence more than tripled between 2006 and 2014. The researchers also found opioid misuse linked to an increased number of chronic conditions, injury risk and elevated alcohol dependence and mental health diagnoses.
*** “Bereavement Researcher: We Must Do Better for the Grief-Stricken,” by Kevyn Burger, PBS Next Avenue(Feb. 18, 2019): Burger interviewed the University of Georgia’s Toni Miles, MD, PhD, about her research on the impact of grief on close family members. Especially striking is her finding that unaddressed bereavement can place those who may grieve quietly, often alone, at “higher risk for serious health problems, and even their own premature death.”
Burger writes, “As the boomer population ages and more individuals live with grief, Miles believes the time is right to look at bereavement care as a public health issue that can buffer the negative impact of loss. Her research also identifies effective strategies to support the bereaved.”
One example, Miles noted: “To a person, those who are bereaved say, ‘Don’t tell me you know how I feel.’ Even if you think you do, they won’t buy it. It will only anger them. Be prepared to listen, but not everyone wants to talk. In the movie First Man, the Neil Armstrongcharacter (Ryan Gosling) has lost his young daughter. Five years later, her death comes up in a group setting. It brings her back to him and he has to leave. He goes home and is looking at the moon when a friend shows up and asks, ‘Do you want to talk about it?’ Armstrong replies, ‘No, that’s why I came here.’ That moment is very illustrative. He needed his friend to just sit quietly and be a presence for him. Sometimes that’s good enough.”
Not all factors are medical, Miles says: “A death can mean a financial loss to the household. In the statistical model, we found that people who were getting money support from the deceased and take a financial hit are more likely to get sick and die. We often overlook that.”
*** “Why More Millennials Are Becoming Caregivers,” by Zoe Rohrich, PBS NewsHour (Jan 16, 2019): More young Americans are becoming caregivers to elderly or disabled family members, according to a recent study from Genworth Financial, a company that researches long-term care options. That is putting them under considerable stress as they seek to balance their loved ones’ needs with their own work, finances and need to care for their children.
In 2010, Genworth, surveyed 800 individuals and found that the average age of caregivers was age 53. Eight years later, after a survey of 1,200 individuals, the group found that number had dropped to 47.Care recipients are getting younger, too. In 2010, more than half were older than 75. Less than a decade later, the average recipient’s age is 66 years old.
*** “Quality of Life Enhanced for Seniors with Companion Animals,” by D. Kevin McNeir, The Washington Informer(Feb. 21, 2019):“In less than 20 years, according to U.S. Census data, older adults will outnumber children for the first time in our history. Most seniors will be women likely live at home with the assistance of family caregivers. Because experts in aging are concerned about the rising number of older Americans who will be isolated, their research has focused on a range of potential remedies, such as pet ownership. Although increasing research shows the health and mental wellness benefits many elders, seniors also face legal barriers to owning cats or dogs when they must give up family homes and move to smaller residences, such as senior living apartments or assisted living.”
*** “Changing How We Age,” by Peter McDermott, Irish Echo(Feb. 10, 2019): Rozalyn Anderson, PhD, directs the Metabolism of Aging Research Program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and is biological sciences co-editor-in-chief of the Journals of Gerontology. Last years, the native of Dalkey, County Dublin, was instrumental in the journal’s special issue entitled, “Caloric Restriction and Restrictive Diets: Interventions that Target the Biology of Aging.” She noted, “Ultimately what these studies show is that what you eat influences how you age.” [OK, maybe we should just split one slice of that tiramisu.]
*** “Vietnamese Death Anniversaries Unite Young and Old,” by Christine Nguyen, MD,KALW Public Radio “Crosscurrents” (Jan. 17, 2019): Every year after a Vietnamese person’s death, their children and grandchildren make a feast. The event joins generations together in a commitment that extends beyond death. The death anniversary is an expression of Vietnamese identity and values in a world where traditions inevitably change. Reporter Christine Nguyen looked at her grandmother’s celebration and its meaning in her family. Click here to hear her story.
*** “Age-Friendly Universities: Colleges are making dramatic changes to attract older students,” by Liz Seegert, Considerable.com (Jan. 15, 2019): “Over the past decade, there’s been an upswing in adults 50 and older attending two and four-year colleges, or getting graduate degrees. Their reasons vary, from finally finishing that on-hold bachelor’s degree to advancing existing careers to launching second acts. . . . Either way, older students say the academic environment must accommodate their busy lives and multiple responsibilities. More colleges and universities are recognizing this trend, sparking a formalized, growing age-friendly university, or AFU, movement. An age-friendly university is different than existing programs specifically designed for older adults like the Osher Lifelong Learning Centers, or traditional online degree programs. . . . More than 600,000 adults age 50 and up were enrolled in public or private colleges in 2011, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. By 2015, enrollment had increased to nearly 700,000.”
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 2019 JNG. For more information contact GBO Editor Paul Kleyman.
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