GBO NEWS: Age Reporting Fellowship Deadline Extended; Remembering Gail Sheehy; Biden Platform on Aging (GOP’s Is Guess Who?); Don’t Trust Mitt’s TRUST Act; OK, Boomer Book’s Nuanced Ageism; View of Nursing Home COVID Disaster from Room 10; Creative Aging Query for Reporters
GENERATIONS BEAT ONLINE NEWS
E-News of the Journalists Network on Generations – Our 27th Year.
August 28, 2020 — Volume 27, 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 (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: Lord Valdemort & Cruella de Vil vs. Light in America.
1. EYES ON THE PRIZE: Journalists Aging Fellowship Deadline Extended, Sept. 14.
2. REMEMBERING GAIL SHEEHY: *** Still Life With Reporter
3. PARTY PLATFORMS
*** “2020 Election: What Biden’s Democratic Platform Proposes for People 50+,” (What’s mentioned — and what isn’t),” by Chris Farrell, Next Avenue;
*** “Don’t Trust the TRUST Act,” by Alicia H. Munnell, MarketWatch (But Isn’t Sen. Mitt Romney a good-guy Republican?)
4. THE STORYBOARD
*** “What Happened in Room 10,” by Katie Engelhart, California Sunday (nursing home pandemic disaster of 2020);
*** “How the ‘OK Boomer, Let’s Talk’ Author Says Millennials Got Left Behind,” by Rich Eisenberg, PBS Next Avenue.
5. CREATIVE AGING COVID QUERY: *** Researcher asks reporters for stories/sources on music arts projects for homebound/isolated elders.
1. EYES ON THE PRIZE
*** JOURNALIST IN AGING FELLOWSHIP DEADLINE EXTENDED, SEPT. 14: We’re extending the application deadline for the 11th annual Journalists in Aging Fellows Program, which should be of keen interest to staff and freelance reporters alike, who write about the intersection of health care, economics, demographics and society. The fellowship, which comes with a $1,500 stipend, is open to journalists in the mainstream or ethnic/ community media in any language, distributed to general audiences in the United States. The program is sponsored by the Journalists Network on Generations, publisher of GBONews.org, and The Gerontological Society of America (GSA).
Go to the applications website for full details – and please pass this information on to other reporters you think might be interested. There will be up to 15 spots this year, half from the mainstream media, and half from ethnic/community news sites.
The 2020 program will hold its educational webinars entirely online, of course, starting the last week of October and continuing with election-aftermath sessions the week following Nov. 3. Web sessions will provide background information framed by news trends and developments, on post-election policy, the pandemic and racial, ethnic and income disparities in health and financial security. Our academic/scientific partner, the Gerontological Society of America, will connect selected Fellows with topnotch experts both in the webinars and individually, as they research their proposed projects.
Applicants can work in any media format (print, audio, video, online, and so on). Each application must include a 1-to-2 page story pitch on any topic in aging, plus a letter or email approval from an editor or producer saying their news outlet will consider the proposed story or series as an assignment for publication, if it is chosen for the fellowship.
For the first time this year, the program’s funders include a grant-maker from the realm of journalism, the Gannett Foundation. We’re proud to have them aboard to support the Journalists in Aging Fellows Program. Also, the program’s major funders so far this year include the Silver Century Foundation, RRF Foundation for Aging and The John A. Hartford Foundation.
Since its start in 2010, this fellowship project has generated over 700 news stories in English, produced by 170 alumni, with many translated from Spanish, Chinese, Korean and other languages. Our intergenerational community of journalists has included reporters from their 20s to their 80s, many of whom continue to produce stories about new scientific findings, policy debates, innovations and evidence-based solutions.
Because of COVID-19, fellows will not personally congregate at the GSA Annual Scientific Meeting, Nov. 4-7. Originally scheduled for Philadelphia, the full conference will now narrow-cast its many expert sessions on the latest scientific and social science developments in aging online. One advantage to reporters everywhere is that sessions will be recorded and accessible later, particularly for those facing election-related deadlines that week. GBONews.org will have more about this later.
A continuously updated list of stories from the fellows and the hundreds of participating news organizations is available online.
Also, for the first time, we welcome Liz Seegert as the fellowship’s co-director, representing the Journalists Network on Generations. A New York-based freelance journalist, she is editor of the Association of Health Care Journalists’ Core Topic section on Aging. Seegert succeeds the program’s co-founder, Paul Kleyman, who is continuing as its senior advisor. Seegert will work closely with co-director Todd Kluss, GSA’s Director of Communications and Editor-in-Chief, Gerontology News, who was on the program’s founding staff. If you have questions, contact Seegert: www.lizseegert.com; 718-229-5730 (work) or 516-225-9636 (mobile); or Kluss: tkluss@geron.org; 202-587-2839.
2. REMEMBERING GAIL SHEEHY
Still Life With Reporter
*** News of Gail Sheehy’s Death at age 83 on Aug. 24, from pneumonia (possibly hastened by COVID-19), stunned me and unreeled a montage of moments I had the privilege of experiencing with her.
I first met Gail Sheehy at the What’s Next business and aging conference in the mid-2000s when she spoke, unexpectedly for me, about family caregiving. Her presence was notable because few prominent journalists had been drawn to topics of aging. Was it a sign that the publishing world was starting to take notice? When conference organizer, Mary Furlong, introduced me to her, I was immediately struck by her warmth and collegial interest in our journalists network on aging.
Sheehy’s attention to family care wasn’t a passing interest. I learned of her years of caregiving for her husband, New York Magazine co-founder Clay Felker, due to recurring cancer. Sheehy was intensively researching what would become one of her 17 books, Passages in Caregiving: Turning Chaos Into Confidence (Morrow, 2010).
It wasn’t until I met her again in the spring of 2008, that I realized how complete her immersion in this mostly media-neglected subject was. I joined Furlong and other colleagues to stop by her suite at the Omni Hotel in Washington, D.C. She was to headline a plenary session at the annual meeting of the American Society, which put her up in the luxury accommodations.
But when the petite Sheehy greeted us, her reddish-blonde hair perfectly trimmed to the nape, her incandescent blue eyes fixing her keen interest on each of us, I scanned the room noticing only one sign of human occupation. The suite’s plushly-appointed rooms were as immaculate as museum galleries, ones that hadn’t been visited much of late. But in one corner of the front room, near the elegant French windows, was a small desk, its chair angled out, the desktop and surrounding arc of carpet piled with books, files and strewn pages. The scene was a still life that could have been titled, “Reporter at Work.”
Later, during a reception, she told me, guiltily, that she was limiting her travel schedule, which wasn’t always possible, so as not to stray far from Manhattan. She was set on devoting every possible minute to Clay. His health was sinking, and he would die that summer at age 82. She stayed close enough to be able to dash back to New York when his health might take a bad turn.
She had only just returned home in a scene she’d later write about. After his distress passed, she found she was able to relax into a quiet evening with the once-vigorous love of her life. Although he was bedridden and unable to eat, they could share a few hours like old times. Gail slipped a favorite movie – I don’t recall which — into the video player. She said, “And I got into bed next to him to watch, the way we used to.”
We stayed in touch sporadically, and I was proud to have helped with a few sources for Passages in Caregiving, particularly by connecting her with a Latina caregiver Gail was determined to include, so the book would represent a wide range of cultural diversity. In the book, she described my friend’s care for her mother at length.
I last saw Gail at the 2012 American Public Health Association (APHA) conference in San Francisco. It was late October and I was delighted to see her near the exhibit hall, signing books. We planned to meet at 5 o’clock for a drink, but as the day wore on, news of billowed through the halls of Moscone Convention Center of the devastation that Hurricane Sandy was visiting upon New York. I called her at the Marriott where she was working her cell phone for interviews with nursing home staff and service providers to learn the fate of seniors in the storm. There was no way for so much as a glass of chardonnay with her, and she picked my brain for potential sources back in the Tri-state area. (I wasn’t much help.) Gail Sheehy was very much the journalist at work, reaching out, doing what she loved, reporting, well into the night.
Most recently, she wrote a piece for AARP Bulletin, headlined “Sharing Your Home With a Pet Is Also Good for Your Health,” which went online, Aug. 7, 2020, Gail wrote that because of the pandemic, “As a ‘young’ octogenarian, I’ve been confined to home lately. But I have survived quite well on two essentials. One is Chollie, a Cavalier King Charles spaniel who lives with me in Manhattan. The other is phone calls from my companion of the past 10 years, Robert, who since March has been sequestered in Sag Harbor, New York, by his ever-watchful son.” She died while visiting him on Long Island two weeks after the story appeared.
3. PARTY PLATFORMS
*** “2020 Election: What Biden’s Democratic Platform Proposes for People 50+,” (What’s mentioned — and what isn’t),” by Chris Farrell, Next Avenue (Aug. 10, 2020): In the last issue of GBONews, this editor note observing former Vice President Joe Biden’s mentally alert, but boring press-conference recitation shown on CSPAN of his campaign policy platform. How ironic that given his spirited “the old Joe is back” performance at the Democratic convention, he and his party were widely criticized that week for being “light on policy.”
Meanwhile, the opposition has simply declared their policy positions to be – Donald J. Trump. As a platform, the president’s girth may provide unsteady footing, at best, for his base leadership, and for Social Security, Medicare and other key issues for our ageing America, at the worst. For candidate Biden, though, the Dem platform does offer substance for appraisal.
For Next Avenue, Chris Farrell, also an economic analyst for American Public Media’s Marketplace and author, most recently of book Purpose and a Paycheck: Finding Meaning, Money and Happiness in the Second Half of Life, scrutinized the Biden campaign promises to 50-plus America on concerns ranging from eldercare to climate change.
He wrote, “Caregiving, caregivers and long-term care: The most striking part of Biden’s platform — to me — is its emphasis on supporting the professional long-term care workforce serving older adults in nursing homes, assisted living facilities and in homes, as well as assisting family caregivers. Biden calls for improving the pay and benefits of the low-wage direct care workforce, such as home care aides and personal care assistants. They often earn minimum wage with no benefits. The draft platform backs a national minimum wage of $15 an hour for the caregiving workforce. In addition, they’d get up to 12 weeks of federally provided paid family and medical leave.”
The Dem’s caregiving platform also pledges to ask Congress to pass an annual tax credit of up to $5,000 for informal caregivers, and it would credit unpaid family caregivers toward Social Security benefits for the time they spend caregiving. It would provide a $450 billion initiative toward getting 800,000 people off waiting lists for community care through state Medicaid programs.
Farrell, added, though, “Biden’s platform also embraces state Medicaid home- and community-based care for low-income adults. The plan falls well short of universal long-term care coverage, though. For example, it doesn’t include much to benefit middle-income recipients of long-term care and their families.”
He quoted journalist Howard Gleckman, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute, who wrote in Forbes. “These are the millions of people who are not poor enough to be eligible for Medicaid, but do not have sufficient resources to purchase assistance on their own.” Farrell went on, “Still, analysts like Gleckman applaud Biden for grasping the need for better long-term care support and services.”
Farrell’s piece also touches on aging-relevant issues addressed in the Biden/Dem platform on taxes; improvements to Social Security, such as a 20% benefit increase for surviving spouses and their children. The Biden approach to retirement security and savings, said Farrell, “is pragmatic rather than bold.”
More intergenerationally, he wrote that a Next Avenue reader survey of its 50+ readers taken before the pandemic “found climate change was the Number One election issue for them. The Democratic draft platform calls for rejoining the Paris Climate Agreement and greatly increasing federal investments in clean energy research and development.”
*** “Don’t Trust the TRUST Act,” by Alicia H. Munnell, MarketWatch (Aug. 18, 2020): But isn’t Sen. Mitt Romney the kinder, gentler Republican?
Munnell, director of Boston College’s Center for Retirement Research, doesn’t mention the TRUST Act’s chief sponsor by name in her regular MarketWatch blog, but she’s clear on the bill’s chief target.
Munnell wrote, “Shivers went up my spine when I heard that the TRUST Act might be included as part of additional action on COVID-19. It sounds like a benign piece of bipartisan legislation, but it could well lead to major cuts to Social Security and Medicare.”
She explained, “The TRUST Act would create ‘Rescue Committees’ for any federal government trust fund spending more than $20 billion annually that faces insolvency by 2035.” Under these criteria, the bill would apply to Social Security’s Old Age and Survivors Insurance program, Medicare’s Hospital Insurance, and other programs with a trust fund providing a long-term financial cushion.
She outlined the bipartisan structure of the Rescue Committees, then said, “So, what’s so bad, you might ask? My main concern is Social Security. Indeed, it does have a trust fund that is running out of money, and it does need to solve a long-run financing problem. Specifically, the cost of scheduled benefits exceeds scheduled revenues (see figure 1 below), with the difference being bridged by the assets in the trust fund. These assets are projected to be depleted in 2034, and — if Congress takes no action — benefits will have to be cut by 20% to 25%.”
Munnell, who was a senior treasury official in the Clinton Administration, impeaches the proposal: “In my view, cutting benefits is unacceptable. People absolutely need at least the current level of benefits to have a fighting chance of security in retirement. The National Retirement Risk Index, which the Center produces, shows that — even with the current level of Social Security — more than half of today’s working-age households are at risk of being unable to maintain their standard of living in retirement.”
Instead, she recommends strengthening Social Security for retirees’ looming needs. “To pay for these benefit enhancements and, more important to eliminate the 75-year deficit, the legislation: 1) raises the combined OASDI payroll tax of 12.4% by 0.1% a year until it reaches 14.8% in 2043; and 2) applies the payroll tax on earnings above $400,000 (and on all earnings once the taxable maximum reaches $400,000). The legislation includes a small offsetting benefit for these additional taxes.”
4. THE STORYBOARD
*** “What Happened in Room 10,” by Katie Engelhart, California Sunday Magazine (Aug. 24, 2020): The lead: “That Tuesday night, Helen lay awake and listened to her roommate dying. She heard the nurses moving around. Their whispers. She heard the heaving of the oxygen machine. At some point, someone had closed the curtain that divided the room, but it didn’t do much to mute the noise. The beds were so close together that each woman could hear the other breathing — and that was true on a normal day, before the coughing. It was four days into the outbreak.”
Engelhart’s brilliant long-form account of the nursing home pandemic disaster of 2020, f should stands as a template for covering the fragmented mess of long-term care in the United States. . The article includes deeply personal stories of patients, families and caregivers; the historical failures of the regulatory system; and the greed and underlying ageism of private equity owners (aided and abetted by politicians), especially the Trumps Administration. The story demonstrates, in Englehart’s clear, thoroughly researched reporting, punctuated with Matt Bollinger’s stunning animated illustrations and photographs by Jovelle Tamayo, how COVID-19 has exposed every weak and dangerous link in America’s jury-rigged system of eldercare.
Her article is about the intimate account of the first COVID-19 outbreak at the Life Care Center nursing home in Kirkland, Wash., where 46 residents died. Told through the story of Room 10 roommates, Helen and Twilla, Engelhart does not shy from the hard realities of eldercare.
After Helen moved to the nursing home, and before the pandemic, she covered the wall above her bed “with photographs and a map of the world so that nurses could point to the countries where they were from and [she] could ask them what life was like there. When [her daughter] Carolyn visited on the weekends, Helen wanted to know what was happening in the world. . . She wanted to know how many people were homeless and what the government was going to do about it. She asked how Shiites were being treated in such and such a place compared with Sunnis. At first, her curiosity startled her daughter; Helen had never seemed so interested in the world before.”
For Helen’s roommate, dementia took harsh turns: “On a good day, Twilla might be calm. She might nap in the special bed that was meant to prevent bedsores. She might wheel the facility’s halls. But on a bad day, she might shriek at the top of her lungs. Some of the things she said made no sense at all. Other times, they were awful things, sometimes racist things, hurled straight at the nurses who cared for her. When Debbie heard Twilla yell that way, she thought about how humiliated her mother would have been by the sight of herself. Other times, Twilla yelled at Helen. ‘I’m going to kill you,’ she said once. ‘I don’t think you are,’ said Helen.”
For facility staff, including nursing professionals, who risked their safety daily, the stress mounted daily. Exacerbating the system’s laxities, trolling began once the media exposed the facility’s flawed response and mounting coronavirus deaths. Engelhart learned, “The night shift was when the creeps started calling. When [nurse]Chelsey answered the phone, people told her that they were priests and healers and that they knew the cure for the virus. . . . Their cures were always lunatic. One guy told Chelsey to mix baking soda and lime juice and rub it in her patients’ eyeballs.”
Engelhart, an author, NBC producer and fellow of the New America think tank, seamlessly incorporated the history of long-term care, describing how “the modern nursing home has adapted itself to the freakish architecture of Medicare (for people over 65) and Medicaid (for those on low incomes or with disabilities) and the vast gaps inside and between them.”
She continued, “Specifically, the facilities benefit from a patchwork insurance landscape that often pushes older Americans into institutional living. Take, for example, falls — like the ones that precipitated Helen’s and Twilla’s move into Life Care. Each year, about 30 million older Americans fall, resulting in 300,000 broken hips and 30,000 deaths. Nevertheless, many elderly people are not assessed to see if they are at risk of falling and could be helped to avoid it — in part because there is a shortage of geriatricians trained in the practice but also because, until recently, primary-care doctors could not bill insurance for the assessments and so didn’t do them.”
Although the erosion of long-term care protections has been a long-term process, Engelhart recounts how industry pression, especially by $4 million a year lobbying effort by the American Health Care Association (AHCA), representing for-profit nursing homes, influenced significant deregulation by the Trump White House.
As early as July 2017, the story says, “The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services made sweeping changes to the way that nursing homes are fined for harming and endangering their residents, in a manner that saved the industry nearly $50 million in penalties in just 18 months. Then, in 2019, the agency proposed to go further. Its administrator, Seema Verma, promised to remove requirements on the nursing-home industry that are ‘unnecessary, obsolete, or excessively burdensome,’ and in doing so to save facilities more than $600 million a year. . . It also recommended, just months before COVID appeared, that existing infection-prevention measures be relaxed.”
More than being critical of one administration’s actions, though, Engelhart emphasizes, “This isn’t just about nursing homes. COVID and our response to it have revealed something rotten in modern medicine. Look anywhere and there is proof of ageism.” She points to the failure of either Medicare or private insurance to pay for hearing aids, “even though they cost, on average, $2,300 an ear — and even if they would help keep a person living independently and living vividly and, in this moment, would allow them to speak with quarantined family members over Zoom.” Widening this gap and many others in continuing care, is the lack of geriatric physicians in the United States.
*** “How the ‘OK Boomer, Let’s Talk’ Author Says Millennials Got Left Behind,” by Rich Eisenberg, PBS Next Avenue (Aug. 25, 2020): Eisenberg, managing editor of the PBS news website on aging, writes, “In her provocative new book, OK Boomer, Let’s Talk: [https://tinyurl.com/yyd87wns] How My Generation Got Left Behind, Atria/One Signal Publishers, 2020), millennial author and journalist Jill Filipovic argues that baby boomers are largely to blame for the financial, employment and health woes of millennials.” So, boomer Eisenberg took her up on the invitation to talk.
He continues, “During my interview with the 37-year-old CNN columnist and New York Times contributing opinion writer, and after reading her book, I discovered that Filipovic’s condemnation of boomers was more nuanced than her title suggests. It turns out that Filipovic credits boomers (now age 56 to 74) for a few things and takes millennials (now age 24 to 40) to task a bit, too. Also, I learned, some of her vitriol against boomers is really directed at conservative boomer commentators on Fox News and talk radio.”
For instance, she told him, “There are a lot of boomers who are doing incredible, important work who have spent their lives trying to improve things. They have not captured as much political power as the conservative Donald Trump baby boomers in the world. That doesn’t mean that they don’t exist. And I think that when we paint a generation with a broad brush, we miss the fact that baby boomer women entered the workforce in record numbers, which very much did open up a series of opportunities that women of my generation are getting to enjoy.
She went on, “Not everything that is wrong in America is the fault of the baby boomers and much of the progress that we’ve seen in the last half century is thanks to baby boomers. The progressive half of the boomer generation deserves quite a lot of credit.”
Filipovic speaks of shades, but she sells her book for its black-and-white generational divisiveness. Nothing new there in make-a-name-for-yourself journalism (or politics).
Later in the interview she said, “One source of frustration is that baby boomers had a chance to both continue and expand the government programs that really did open so many doors to them and prop up the ladder to the middle class. But instead what happened is that boomers shut those doors and pulled the ladder up.” There’s the broad fecal brush in her right hand again. But notice the underlying truth she tries to whitewash—the economic divide based on a specious demographic split.
Who are the boomers at fault, again, the ones who gained power? How about Bill Clinton (the disaster of ending “welfare as we know it”), and George W. Bush (the never-ending wars in Iraq and Afghanistan). Filipovic’s answers expose far less about age than about Ivy League economic class. But, hey, ageism sells.
5. CREATIVE AGING COVID QUERY TO REPORTERS
*** Researcher’s Request to Reporters: Creative Aging COVID Stories: Have you or your colleagues done stories about COVID-related creative aging projects using music or the other arts to help homebound or isolated older adults and their loved ones to stay resilient and connected? GBONews received a request from Judith-Kate Friedman, producer and founder of the Songwriting Works Educational Foundation (songwritingworks.org) for help from reporters on her research about community artists, either individually or in programs, who are reaching out to help older adults.
Friedman e-mailed, “With the pandemic continuing and millions of elders and family care partners sheltering in place, how are music and the arts having a positive impact on people’s lives? What are the stories? Beyond telehealth, what’s working to keep homebound and isolated older adults and their loved ones vital, creative, at this time? Which formats and technologies are — and aren’t – working? Who has access?”
Shew explained that during her over 30 years in the field, teaching-artists in diverse disciplines have developed well researched in-person programs intended to break acute isolation, relieve hopelessness, dissolve loneliness and depression, and quell boredom, agitation and fear. During the COVID pandemic, her study asks, “How are these artists and organizations ‘pivoting’ to be of service? Are innovations happening in the neighborhoods/regions where you’re reporting? living? What conditions are present that are contributing to success? From your point of view: where can teaching artists be of greatest service now? What would you like to see happening?”
Friedman, an award-winning songwriter with a most glorious folk-style voice, is also a published academic researcher on music therapy. And she developed model programs for writing and recording songs with elders, especially those having dementia. Her project is to compile best practices of those aiming to serve older adults. If you have stories or sources to share, please send information, article links and so on to Friedman at: songwritingworks@gmail.com.
Learn more about Songwriting Work and findings of recent research on the efficacy of the Songwriting Works and Vital Involvement approach with elders residing in low-income (HUD) housing in five states here: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6239685/. General info: https://songwritingworks.org/
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