GBONEWS: Santa’s Dr. Fauci Ornament in Your Stocking; Ageism Goes To Washington Media (Biden’s Cabinet is so OLD!); Fight to Reauthorize Elder Justice Act to Prevent Abuse); Trump-McConnel’s Fed Court Youth-ocracy; COVID-Effect: Medicare/Private-Pay Patient’s Avoid Nursing Homes; & More
GENERATIONS BEAT ONLINE NEWS
E-News of the Journalists Network on Generations – Our 27th Year.
December 24, 2020 — Volume 27, Number 13
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: Your Dr. Anthony Fauci Ornament for the Holiday News Tree. Happy 80th, Dr. Fauci!
1. WHILE YOU WERE AGING: Ageism at New Yorker & Politico.
2. BOB WHO? FIGHTING FOR THE ELDER JUSTICE ACT: *** Nonprofit Lobbyist Bob Blancato Fighting to Reauthorize the Elder Justice Act,” The Hill.
3. THE STORYBOARD:
*** “Covid Spurs Families to Shun Nursing Homes, a Shift That Appears Long Lasting,” by Anna Wilde Matthews and Tom McGinty, Wall Street JournalI;
*** “More Than Others, Trump Judges Show Penchant for Dissent,” by Rebecca Ruiz and Robert Gebeloff, New York Times;
*** “Health Care Comes to Assisted Living: Why demand is growing for having doctors onsite,” by Diane Estabrook, Next Avenue;
*** “Older Adults Feel Isolating Effects of Holidays Upended by COVID,” by Lara Salahi, Wicked Local(Massachusetts).
1. WHILE YOU WERE AGING
*** Anti-Ageism Critic Ashton Applewhite called into question the usually astute New Yorker columnist, Jane Mayer, in her This Chair Rocks blog (Dec. 15), headlined “What’s a better question to be asking about Sen. Dianne Feinstein?” Mayer’s piece followed Politico’s more explicitly thought-vacant commentary, “Welcome to Biden’s Senior Center,” by columnist Theodoric Meyer with political reporter Alex Thompson (Dec. 9, 2020). They warned that the president-elect’s cabinet was looking like “gerontocracy.”
I’ll stipulate: Age matters. Teenagers crash more than their elders. And senior deaths exceed others from auto accidents, not because older drivers crash more (they don’t), but because older bodies are less apt to bounce back from serious injuries. There may well be memory concerns about the conduct of Sen. Feinstein, D-Calif., and similarly, although less reported, with the memory banks of Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, both age 87. But, then, is anyone except those donning a MAGA hat not celebrating the keen and intelligent leadership of Dr. Anthony Fauci, on the occasion of his 80th birthday on Christmas Eve?
Meyer of Politico stumbles around the elderhood of President-elect Biden’s initial cabinet choices. Only in passing does he mention Biden’s selecting so heavily from the Obama administration, so that the new administration can “hit the ground running.” He might have added that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, turning 79 this February, signaled weeks before he actually acknowledged Biden’s win, that given continued GOP control of the Senate, he’d approve only centrist cabinet submissions for Senate confirmation votes.
Appeal as that might to the bipartisan inclinations of President-elect Joe Biden, it’s clearly helpful for him to get the administration moving if many of his choices have already had the Senate’s previous consent. Hence, more experienced, if entrenched Dem leadership is the order of the day, older as they may be. It’s politics as usual.
The Politico focus, though, was not on competence, and not in concerns about the perpetuation of the Democrats’ centrist policies of a bygone period, all legitimate areas of concern. Nope, the looming faultiness in the oldest president, say the younger and middle-ish website reporters, is that his initial selections appear to betray Biden’s campaign pledged “to be ‘a bridge’ to the next generation of Democrats.”
The piece hedges, anticipating the cabinet appointment of Peter Buttigieg, 38, and notes the exceptional diversity of the choices up to then. But that hardly expunges the sheer ageism of their principal warning against looming signs of a Biden-administration gerontocracy. Imagine the response had they charged that there were too many female cabinet nominees – a looming matriarchy.
The seeming indictment of political gerontocracy is inherently ageist. The charge is almost never qualified to mean what’s usually true – that certain people from the upper class have impacted the tooth of power. As analysis goes, it’s flat our lazy journalism, meaningless by itself, not to mention a perpetuation of bias.
As America has learned from its 74-year-old President-un-reelected, even decades of narcissistic life experience still won’t foster the potential gifts of longevity – maturity and enhanced merit.
Applewhite took on Jane Mayer’s Dec. 10, New Yorker piece, headlined, “Dianne Feinstein’s Missteps Raise a Painful Age Question Among Senate Democrats,” objecting, “The issue it raises isn’t a ‘painful age question.’ It’s a painful competence question: is Senator Feinstein capable of carrying out her duties?”
Mayer, 65, provides reporting and analyses that is decidedly more complex than that of the Politico article, except for their facile default to the complaint of “gerontocracy.” Neither grapples fully with underlying issues of incompetence, or lack of availability. (Mayer notes that several Senate octogenarians were incapacitated in illness during important congressional debates in 2017.)
Her article does offer the important age-related footnote that “unlike the Republican leadership in the Senate, which rotates committee chairmanships, the Democrats have stuck with the seniority system. Some frustrated younger members argue that this has undermined the Democrats’ effectiveness by giving too much power to elderly and sometimes out-of-touch chairs, resulting in uncoördinated strategy and too little opportunity for members in their prime.”
In early December 2020, she explains, Senate Dems changed a key rule that now restricts any committee chairperson to holding only one powerful position at a time, such as chair of the judiciary committee, and not be able to control multiple seats of power. The new rule should enable other veteran Democratic members to advance.
She adds, ”This may settle the immediate strife within the Democratic caucus. But Congress’s gerontocracy problem shows no sign of abating.” Again, NO, the problem is systematic power-perpetuation, not all those old people.
As for “out-of-touch,” this editor, as an independent California voter, has hardly been a fan of Sen. Feinstein’s. But what’s to be done about the likes of Devin Nunez, R-Calif., 47. As chair of the House Intelligence Committee (2015-19) he repeatedly displayed an obsequious fealty to President Trump and drew repeated criticism for his fawning lack of, well, congressional independence, much less intelligence, with his denial of evidence that Russia has interfered in the 2016 election. He’s moved on to other assignments, but remains as re-electable as ever in Central California. That his conduct, or that of Sen. Lindsay Graham, 65, R-S.C., were knowing transgressions of logic and democratic leadership should not be incidental reflections of politics as usual.
Setting aside political complexities, the conundrum for journalists holds a decidedly simple answer. Keep your eye on the prejudice. If a bunch of Black officials were caught robbing public coffers – is the issue their blackness? Is the civil service system rigged to favor, say, the Irish for police and fire jobs. Is the problem this Irishness – or patronage that’s blind to others? Possible mental impairment for politicians of any demographic identify certainly should be considered, but also it shouldn’t be assumed based on the behavior of some.
2. BOB WHO? FIGHTING FOR THE ELDER JUSTICE ACT
*** “A Need for Reauthorization of the Elder Justice Act,” by Bob Blancato, The Hill (Dec. 2, 2020): Bob who? Inside the DC Beltway, Bob Blancato is a prime source from the nonprofit, human-dimension of lobbying. His name doesn’t have a prefix such as Sen., Rep. or Secty., but well before his stint as ED of President Clinton’s 1995 White House Conference on Aging, Blancato has devoted much of his energy to such goals as increasing Meals on Wheels budgets and curtailing elder abuse.
Although most media color K Street’s Mecca of corporate lobbying darkly, Blancato, a principal of the Washington-based government-relations firm, Matz, Blancato & Associates, is among the nonprofit movers and shakers who show time and time again that the nation’s capital also has a few good guys and gals pressing for issues that seldom get notice above the fold. His nonprofit portfolio looks like an orphanage of initiatives intended to reduce elder suffering, but which mostly get a bowl of porridge from lawmakers – and a rain check from big-time media until there’s a crisis that can get public attention.
The case in point is Blancato’s current effort, which he explains in his recent op-ed in The Hill, to secure reauthorization for the 2010 Elder Justice Act, part of the Affordable Care Act. Blancato in this effort, wears the hat of national coordinator of the 3,000-member nonpartisan Elder Justice Coalition. He won’t tell you that he pretty much wrote the legislation and got it enacted with bipartisan support, in order to create initial research and policy programs to combat rising abuses, including rampant financial scams. He doggedly spent seven years accomplishing that passage in 2010. Then he spent a few years more fighting to get basic congressional appropriations actually to get the programs started.
The Elder Justice Act was among the ACA programs enacted with a “sunset” date. Blancato writes, “The Act expired on Sept. 30, 2014, but Congress continues to appropriate funding for authorized activities — approximately $12 million per year.” However, says the op-ed, “We are approaching a critical juncture . . . . A law of this importance should not continue to be in legislative limbo. It needs to be renewed and made stronger. Elder abuse continues to impact our nation.”
Blancato explains, “According to the Department of Justice, 10 percent of those 65 and over will be victims of elder abuse of some kind. The FBI estimates that in 2019 alone, older Americans suffered losses of over $3 billion from financial fraud and abuse. Further, the extent of elder abuse has the potential to increase as the older adult population grows and as individuals live longer.”
Blancato adds, “The impact of the pandemic heightens the urgency to renew the act. For example, an estimated 39 percent of all COVID-19 deaths have occurred in nursing homes. A renewed Elder Justice Act can also include some critically needed nursing home reforms, including providing adequate staffing and strengthen the role of long-term care ombudsmen.” (If you don’t know, Title 7 of the chronically underfunded Older Americans Act programs requires states to fund and local area agencies on aging to run programs of “ombudsmen,” who are authorized to walk into long-term care facilities at any time to investigate purported abuses.)
The Elder Justice Act is designed to establish a national network of adult protective services (APS) agencies, much needed, Blancato writes, “because over 90 percent of older adults live in home and community-based settings and APS often is the first to respond to those situations. Currently, 14 states do not provide any dedicated federal funding for APS agencies through the Social Services Block Grant, the sole source of federal funding for APS agencies.”
He goes on, “Another important reason to renew the act is to allow the important work of the Elder Justice Coordinating Council (EJCC) to continue and expand. The Council brings together 14 different federal agencies, all of which are committing existing resources to the fight against elder abuse, to develop a more comprehensive and coordinated approach. . . .The work of the EJCC is needed to crack down on the proliferation of pandemic-related scams and to do a better job of emergency preparedness, especially in long-term care facilities.”
Bob Blancato is a good source for information and quotes on most federal issues on services and social supports in aging.
3. THE STORYBOARD
*** “Covid Spurs Families to Shun Nursing Homes, a Shift That Appears Long Lasting,” by Anna Wilde Matthews and Tom McGinty, Wall Street Journal (Dec. 21, paywall blocked): Subhead: “Fearing infection and isolation, relatives are turning to home care as new services make.” The story reports, “Occupancy in U.S. nursing homes is down by 15%, or more than 195,000 residents, since the end of 2019, driven both by deaths and by the fall in admissions, a Wall Street Journal analysis of federal data shows.” Matthews and McGinty note, “the decline in nursing home patients covered by Medicare, which provides payments vital to the homes” business model . . . has left the industry in precarious financial shape.”
Business model, indeed. Medicare only covers shorter-term medically necessary post-acute care but pays at a higher rate than the more common state-federal Medicaid program. Medicaid, unlike Medicare, which is provided to older and disabled Americans across the board, is a poverty program with widely variant reimbursement levels from state to state, all generally lower than the federal entitlement. WSJ’s article exposes yet another fracture of inequity in the long-term care system and what exactly is vital, not only to business interests, but also to continuing care residents–not just short-term, Medicare/private-pay patients and their families.
*** “More Than Others, Trump Judges Show Penchant for Dissent,” by Rebecca Ruiz and Robert Gebeloff, New York Times (Dec. 17, 2020): Or, we might add the subhead, “Don & Mitch’s Youth Court Revolt.” Ruiz and Gebeloff analyzed over 10,000 judicial decisions during President Trump’s first three years in office, plus 1,700 opinions issued in the first six months of 2020: “The Times found that Trump appointees were more likely to be involved in a case featuring dissent even when those factors were accounted for.” The group, installed on federal benches as much for their contrarian assertiveness as their ideological slant, proved even more prone to conservative views than other GOP appointees.
The story quotes University of Virginia law professor Joshua Fischman, “It’s more polarized. We’ve seen a huge conservative shift. A lot of these judges are very young, and they’ll be there for a long time.”
GBONews wonders whether the Trump-McConnell court presents the U.S. with a youth-ocracy problem, given that the GOP engineered the installation of almost 300 lifetime appointments to the federal judiciary. For Trump-McConnell appointees to the appellate courts, not only their ideology, but their judicial merit raises issues of experience and appropriateness as constitutional arbiters.
According to Ballotpedia.org, as of Dec. 1, 2020, the American Bar Association “had rated 262 of President Trump’s nominees; 185 were rated ‘well-qualified,’ 67 were rated ‘qualified,’ and 10 were rated ‘not qualified,” ABA’s three broad categories. (After ABA downgraded some earlier Trump nominees, the administration announced it would no longer regard their ratings as key guidelines.)
That’s 10 “unqualified” nominations out of 22 total made by presidents since 1989 (four by President Bill Clinton, seven by President G.W. Bush). None of those tapped by President’s G.H.W. Bush or Barack Obama had less than middle “qualified” ratings.
How will the Trump-McConnell judiciary — now more than 25% of all federal judgeships – mature in the coming decades? Many Supreme Court justices, for instance, have commented on how they found their footing on the court after the first decade and then noted changes in their perspective coming years, not ideologically but in broader perspective.
At Quartz, legal analyst Ephrat Livini wrote in 2017, “People evolve over the course of their lifetime appointments, and their perspective from the bench can change as the gravity of the matters they handle becomes more apparent. Even Antonin Scalia made 135 liberal decisions while on the Supreme Court.”
Chief Justice John Roberts, for instance, has prominently shown fealty to the larger principle of judicial precedent to the great disappointment of conservative politicos. But what about those down the federal court judiciary? Might their aging help balance the judicial scales? The recent refusal of many Trump judges to accede to his wild court filings aimed at overturning the 2020 election is a sign, at least, that logic and evidence do mean something when it comes to preserving democratic institutions. But some of the new appellate judges did vote with Rudy Giuliani and the Boss. With many appointed based not on their legal acumen but for their dogged party loyalty, will the Trump judicial bloc mature with experience both in juris prudence and in life? Hopefully, the Times and others will track their decision-making over the coming year?
*** “Health Care Comes to Assisted Living: Why demand is growing for having doctors onsite,” by Diane Eastabrook, Next Avenue (Dec. 18, 2020): She writes, “Traditionally, assisted living facilities have focused more on hospitality than health care, emphasizing dining and group activities, while offering residents day-to-day assistance with things like dressing and bathing. But lately, doctors and other health care providers have been more common in assisted living. . . . The need is growing, and not just because of the pandemic. . . . As the average age of assisted living residents has increased to 85, so has the frailty of those individuals. A 2017, ATI Advisory study found assisted living residents had nearly double the number of annual emergency room visits as those residing in independent living facilities. . . . That’s prompted a growing number of assisted living operators to start shifting their focus more to health care and wellness.”
Eastabrook explains, “While most assisted living facilities have a nurse on staff, a recent poll by The American Seniors Housing Association found that potential customers of 130 senior care providers want something more. Those who responded to the survey cited an onsite primary care physician as a top priority before moving in. . . . Some long-term care operators are developing their own Medicare Advantage plans called special needs plans (or SNPs) that emphasize wellness and illness prevention. “
She adds, “Most Medicare Advantage plans have restrictions, however. Participants might have limited access to physicians outside their plan’s network, for instance. In some cases, residents may need to have lived in the assisted living facility for at least 90 days to be eligible.” Some facilities are also contracting with doctors privately.
*** “Older Adults Feel Isolating Effects of Holidays Upended by COVID,” by Lara Salahi, Wicked Local (Massachusetts, Nov. 16, 2020): “The persisting coronavirus pandemic will upend many traditional family gatherings this holiday season. . . . Adults ages 65 and older are at highest risk of dying from COVID-19, and among those most likely to feel alone and socially isolated amid the pandemic. . . . ‘When deciding whether to include your loved one in a holiday gathering, it is important to take into account both the health and safety of your loved one, as well as the health and safety of your loved one’s roommates, other people living on their floor or in their home, and the staff that care for them,’ Marylou Sudders, Secretary of Health and Human Services for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, said in a written statement.
“While public health experts recommend a 24-hour turnaround for coronavirus test results to prevent COVID-19 outbreaks in nursing homes, fewer than 17% of nursing homes nationwide report receiving test results within a day, according to a study published in October in the Journal of the American Medical Association.”
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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 2020 JNG. For more information contact GBO Editor Paul Kleyman.
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https://www.facebook.com/app_scoped_user_id/100000973913260/ Ruth Migdal Taber