GBO NEWS: Journalists in Aging Fellowships Tap 16; Economic Hardships in Puerto Rico; Long Covid; Zombie Cells; Rents and Homeless Seniors; Danger! Scientific Knowledge Minus Understanding; & MORE
GBO NEWS: Journalists in Aging Fellowships Tap 16; Economic Hardships in Puerto Rico; Long Covid; Zombie Cells; Rents and Homeless Seniors; Danger! Scientific Knowledge Minus Understanding; & MORE
GENERATIONS BEAT ONLINE NEWS
E-News of the Journalists Network on Generations.
September 21, 2022 — Volume 29, Number 11
EDITOR’S NOTE: GBONews, e-news of the Journalists Network on Generations (JNG), publishes alerts for journalists, producers and authors covering generational issues. If you have difficulty getting to the full issue of GBONews with the links provided below, simply go to www.gbonews.org to read the latest or past editions. Send your news of important stories or books (by you and others), fellowships, awards or pertinent kvetches to GBO News Editor Paul Kleyman. [pfkleyman@gmail.com]. 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. NOTE ALSO: Some news links below hit paywalls and are inaccessible without subscriptions, although a number of those do allow free access to the first few stories.
In This Issue: It’s the Autumn Equinox. Happy Fall Colors—Red, Blue, How About More Purple!
1. EYES ON THE PRIZE: *** “Journalists in Aging Fellowships Tap 16 Reporters” (Reporters from Nature to Nerd Wallet, from The AP to Excélsior).
2. GEN BEATLES NEWS: *** AZ Republic’s Debra Utacia Krol nominated for Rocky Mountain Emmy; *** Rodney Brooks’ book, Fixing The Wealth Gap featured at National Association of Black Journalists Vegas conference; *** Farewell, Gen Beat Pioneer, Kay Harvey.
3. THE STORYBOARD
*** “Older and Facing Economic Hardships in Puerto Rico and Abroad,” by Mayra Acevedo, WIPR TV’s “Notiséis 360 PR”;
*** “Zombie Cells Central to Quest for Active Vital Old Age,” by Laura Ungar, Associated Press;
*** “TV Anchor Says She Got Fired for Letting Her Hair Go Gray,” CNN – Let go by Bell Media’s CTV, broadcast veteran Lisa LaFlamme hired to cover Queen Elizabeth II’s funeral for Canada’s CityNews podcast.
*** “High Rents Outpace Federal Disability Payments, Leaving Many Homeless,” by Fred Clasen-Kelly, NPR News;
*** “Orlando Developing Plan for Age-Friendly Living,” by Carolyn Guniss, Orlando Sentinel;
*** “Amazing Grace: A Philadelphia Woman Making a Difference in Guatemala,” by Susan Schaefer, PBS Next Avenue.
4. GOOD SOURCES: *** “Long Covid,” issue of Generations Today special issue, American Society on Aging (Sept.-Oct. 2022); *** “OK, Boomer Bashers: Beating Ageism” Zoom panel now with transcript; *** “Valuable New Framework For Improving Care Of Older Adults,” by Howard Gleckman, Forbes; *** Elder Index, UMass Boston Gerontology Institute, “Measuring the income older adults need to live independently.”
5. WORDS FROM THE WISE: Lewis Mumford on knowledge and self-understanding.
1. EYES ON THE PRIZE:
*** “Journalists in Aging Fellowships Tap 16 Reporters”: Our collaboration between the Gerontological Society of America (GSA) and our Journalists Network on Generations (publisher of GBONews.org) continues with 16 new reporting Fellows, from such varied media outlets as The Associated Press, Nerd Wallet, CQ’s Roll Call, Nature Magazine, the Chinese-language World Journal, Seattle Times, Atlanta Senior Life and the Southern California News Group’s Spanish-language Excélsior.
This year’s “Class 2022-23” brings the program’s total to 217 reporters from over 150 mainstream news organizations, ethnic media, community and senior press outlets throughout the United States. To date they have generated more that 800 stories across most media platforms. (See our continuously updated list of published fellowship stories.)
For the first time since the start of the Covid pandemic, the Fellows will attend the program in-person, at GSA’s Annual Scientific Meeting in Indianapolis, Nov. 2-6. The huge conference will draw over 3,500 experts in aging from 50 countries, many of whom will present hundreds of presentations and research papers on pretty much every topic under the aging sun. In the coming months, the program will also present a series of Zoom panels to these and past fellows.
The Fellows, who will receive a $1,500 stipend, with all travel costs covered, will research their proposed editorial projects on such subjects as the cost burdens of breast cancer, the struggles of Black veterans, mental-health challenges of long-Covid, issues facing LGBTQ older adults, the chronic lack of seniors in clinical drug trials, and the impact of climate change on vulnerable elders.
Following is the list of this year’s New Fellows, whose proposed in-depth projects were chosen by a panel of journalists and gerontologists. In addition, the program will bring back 10 past Fellows to continue their coverage of issues in aging. We will announce them soon.
The 13th “Class” of Journalists in Aging Fellows includes:
Patricia Anstett, Urban Aging News (part of Michigan Solutions Journalism Network). Project: “The Financial Burden of Breast Cancer on Aging Women.” on the financial toxicity of breast cancer with low Medicare and little private coverage.
Michelle Baruchman, Engagement Reporter, Seattle Times. Project: The mental-health and other impacts on LGBTQ+ elders, and how housing communities can help address their needs.
Claire Cleveland, Collective Colorado (nonprofit statewide news arm of the Colorado Trust, with English articles translated into Spanish). Project: The search for non-discriminatory assisted living the won’t force LGBTQ+ seniors back into the “closet.”
Ann Hedreen, 3rd Act Magazine, Seattle. Project: How reflection and writing, especially during the Covid pandemic, helped older adults define meaning in their lives.
Jessie Hellmann, Roll Call (Congressional Quarterly’s Washington daily covering Capitol Hill). Project: Elderly Americans and the risk for substance abuse in the opiod epidemic.
Abriana Herron, Indianapolis Recorder. Project: Series on the lives and struggles of Black veterans in Indianapolis, with multimedia elements accessible to the Black deaf community.
Ambika Kandasamy, San Francisco Public Press. Project: The health risks of climate change, such as heat waves, for older adults with focus on model solutions developed in San Francisco’s Chinatown and other US cities.
Jyoti S Madhusoodanan, Nature Magazine. Project: The continued exclusion of older people from clinical trials for treatments often intended for them.
Nora Malacuso, Next Avenue (PBS-affiliated website for 50+ readers): Project: Aging and marginalized immigrant communities, a series focusing on Philadelphia.
Barbara Mantel, CQ Researcher. Project: A comprehensive examination of the growing mental health toll of older people, exacerbated by the Covid pandemic.
Mey Lyn Mitteen, Excélsior (Spanish-language weekly, Southern California News Group, publisher of the Los Angeles Daily News and others). Project: Latinx Seniors and Technology during the pandemic.
Alex Rosenberg, NerdWallet. Project: Evaluating ‘alternatives’ to Medicare, such as Mark Cuban’s Cost Plus Drugs, direct primary care options, and others, to advise on consumers how to distinguish scams from effective programs.
Anita Snow, The Associated Press, Phoenix, Ariz. Project: Climate Change and seniors’ increasing vulnerability to temperature extremes, focusing on public accountability and solutions.
Annmarie Timmins, New Hampshire Bulletin (statewide nonprofit website). Project: State legislative controversies over long-term care policies in wake of Covid.
Mark Woolsey, Atlanta Senior Life. Project: Mental Health issues for seniors with long-haul Covid.
Yiyang Zheng, World Journal (New York bureau). Project: Bilingual Chinese-English investigation of how New York Chinatown families hit by Covid have rebuilt and recovered, as well as their continuing difficulties.
The 2022-23 funders includes the Silver Century Foundation, John A. Hartford Foundation, Archstone Foundation, the Commonwealth Fund, and the NIHCM Foundation , plus a special thank you to John Migliaccio.
2. GEN BEATLES NEWS
*** The Arizona Republic’s Debra Utacia Krol was nominated for a Rocky Mountain Emmy Award for her multimedia series, “Sacred Spaces” series starting with “Indigenous people find legal, cultural barriers to protect sacred spaces off tribal lands.” Krol is AZ Republic’s reporter on indigenous issues and a former Journalists in Aging Fellow. The 2022 regional winners will be announced at the 45th annual gala in Phoenix, Oct. 1.
*** Rodney Brooks’ book, Fixing The Wealth Gap, was featured in the #authorshowcase at the August convention of the National Association of Black Journalists at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas.
*** Farewell, Gen Beat Pioneer, Kay Harvey, 76: GBONews received a sad note from former Minneapolis Star-Tribune writer on aging, Warren Wolfe. Our colleague, Kay Harvey, also Wolfe’s former compatriot on the generations beat at the other Twin Cities mainstay, the St. Paul Pioneer Press, died in a Twin Cities in a memory care facility on Aug. 17. She was 76.
Wolfe, a Journalists Network on Generations co-founder, emailed about Harvey, “She was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease six or seven years ago. She told me about it when she showed up shortly after that at a program our local Roseville dementia-education group was putting on.”
Harvey, who spent 26 at the paper after joining the staff in 1980, began turning up at conference on aging in the early 1990s, including the American Society on Aging Annual Meeting, when GBO’s editor was putting out ASA’s newspaper, Aging Today. A few years later, it was with a twinge of regret that I learned from her that she planned to apply for a master’s degree in human development, with an emphasis on aging. Although I was worried that journalism would lose her considerable talent, but she assured me that she planned to continue writing but wanted to deepen her knowledge. I gladly wrote her a letter of recommendation for the master’s program at St. Mary’s College.
As the Pioneer Press obituary noted, in 2000, she reported on the final months of a woman diagnosed with terminal breast cancer. The result, with photograph by Richard Marshall, was her four-part feature series on Gwen Frazier — “Dying Well”. The obituary added that the stories “so captivated her co-workers that several looked to her as the newspaper’s in-house expert on mortality and the emotional intricacies of preparing for one’s own final departure.”
After Harvey left the Pioneer Press in 2006, she did some life coaching and continued freelance feature writing, mainly for Minn Press. While writing for that news site, she received one of our Journalists in Aging Fellowships in 2011.
Following her diagnosis, Wolfe wrote, “She and her husband Gary participated in a Giving Voice choral group created for people with dementia and their care partners. I attended several of their concerts, which were amazingly good — and upbeat.”
3. THE STORYBOARD
Editor’s Note: In the wake of Hurricane Fiona, yet another climate disaster to hit the US’s largest territory, Puerto Rico, public broadcasting’s Mayra Acevedo is continuing her coverage of elders on the Caribbean island. Meanwhile, GBONews.org includes the following summary and link of the ongoing employment concerns for low-income seniors in PR.
*** “Older and Facing Economic Hardships in Puerto Rico and Abroad,” by Mayra Acevdo, WIPR TV’s “Notiséis 360 PR” (originally aired on Puerto Rico Public TV, June 2022. (See 4-min. video in Spanish with English subtitles). A written version with the links also ran on the Diverse Elders Coalition website. The Dek: “This program helps them re-enter the workforce and find financial and emotional support.”
The Lede: “Silvana Colón retired 10 years ago, after a career in advertising and teaching. As she searched for a job to supplement her pension she found, ‘After you are 55 years old, it’s hard to find a job because there is discrimination because of your age.’”
The Dilemma: “Unfortunately, I started teaching, and teachers do not pay into Social Security. . . . I only receive what I paid before that period at the Education Department.” As in many parts of the US, public employees are not covered by federal Social Security, but instead have pensions through the state or territorial government. Asked if her pension is enough to live on, Colón stated, ‘No, it’s not enough, it’s not enough.’”
A Solution: “Now she works as a paid volunteer under Senior Community Service Employment Program (SCSEP), offered in PR through the AARP Foundation. The federal service-based training is for low-income adults ages 55 years and older and is managed around the US and territories by nonprofit organizations. . . Through SCSEP they receive training, coaching, and job-seeking tools to compete for current in-demand jobs.”
And: SCSEP connects participants nonprofit organizations and employers after they receive training. Maria Soledad, a former journalist, currently manages social media for the Book Museum in Old San Juan. “Here I have discovered a new world, she said. “It’s fascinating. I love it.”
*** “Zombie Cells Central to Quest for Active Vital Old Age,” by Laura Ungar, Associated Press (Sept. 3, 2022): The Lede: “In an unfinished part of his basement, 95-year-old Richard Soller zips around a makeshift track encircling boxes full of medals he’s won for track and field and long-distance running. Without a hint of breathlessness, he says: ‘I can put in miles down here.’”
The Nutshell: Soller, who lives near Cincinnati, has achieved an enviable goal chased by humans since ancient times: Staying healthy and active in late life. It’s a goal that eludes so many that growing old is often associated with getting frail and sick. But scientists are trying to change that — and tackle one of humanity’s biggest challenges — through a little known but flourishing field of aging research called cellular senescence. It’s built upon the idea that cells eventually stop dividing and enter a ‘senescent’ state in response to various forms of damage. The body removes most of them. But others linger like zombies.
“They aren’t dead. But as the Mayo Clinic’s Nathan LeBrasseur puts it, they can harm nearby cells like moldy fruit corrupting a fruit bowl. They accumulate in older bodies, which mounting evidence links to an array of age-related conditions such as dementia, cardiovascular disease and osteoporosis.”
A Quote: “But scientists wonder: Can the zombie cell buildup be stopped? ‘The ability to understand aging – and the potential to intervene in the fundamental biology of aging – is truly the greatest opportunity we have had, maybe in history, to transform human health,’ LeBrasseur says. Extending the span of healthy years impacts ‘quality of life, public health, socioeconomics, the whole shebang.’”
The Stats: “Cellular senescence is ‘a very hot topic,’ says Viviana Perez Montes of the National Institutes of Health. According to an Associated Press analysis of an NIH research database, there have been around 11,500 total projects involving cellular senescence since 1985, far more in recent years. About 100 companies, plus academic teams, are exploring drugs to target senescent cells.”
Who?: Leonard Hayflick, the scientist who discovered cellular senescence in 1960, is himself vital at 94. He’s a professor of anatomy at the University of California, San Francisco, and continues to write, present and speak on the topic. At his seaside home in Sonoma County. . . ., on the living room table are numerous copies of his seminal book, How and Why We Age, in various languages. . . At this point, he says, ‘the field that I discovered has skyrocketed to an extent that’s beyond my ability to keep up with it.’”
Who Else? LeBrasseur, who directs a center on aging at Mayo, says exercise is “the most promising tool that we have” for good functioning in late life, and its power extends to our cells. Research suggests it counters the buildup of senescent ones, helping the immune system clear them and counteracting the molecular damage that can spark the senescence process.
“A study LeBrasseur led last year provided the first evidence in humans that exercise can significantly reduce indicators, found in the bloodstream, of the burden of senescent cells in the body.”
*** “TV Anchor Says She Got Fired for Letting Her Hair Go Gray. See CNN anchors’ reaction,” CNN (Aug 30, 2022): CNN’s Erica Hill, Christine Romans and Rahel Solomon share their thoughts about the firing of Canadian TV news anchor Lisa LaFlamme, 58, after she claimed she Bell Media ousted her because she let her hair go gray.
According to CNN, Bell media denied that age was a factor, “Despite reports that an executive asked, ‘Who approved the decision to, quote, ‘let Lisa’s hair go gray.’” Hill, Romans and business correspondent Solomon open up on the open secret in TV news that there’s long been a “double standard” between men and women on the air. (5-minutes).
Fortunately, after Bell’s CTV declined to renew LaFlamme’s contract, she was hired by
Canada’s CityNews to lead its in-depth coverage in London of the Royal funeral of Queen Elizabeth II for its The Big Story podcast.
*** “High Rents Outpace Federal Disability Payments, Leaving Many Homeless,” by Fred Clasen-Kelly, NPR News (Sept.15, 2022):
The Lede: “After two months of sleeping in the Salvation Army Center of Hope homeless shelter in Charlotte, N.C., Margaret Davis has had no luck finding an apartment she can afford. The 55-year-old grandmother receives about $750 a month from the federal government. She’s trying to live on just $50 cash and $150 in food stamps each month so she can save enough for a place to call home.
“Davis is homeless even though she receives funds from the Supplemental Security Income program, a hard-to-get federal benefit that was created nearly 50 years ago to lift Americans who are older, blind or disabled out of poverty — whether or not they have a work history that qualifies them for the Social Security Disability Insurance program, which may pay more.”
A Stat: “When Congress created SSI in 1972, the legislation promised that recipients ‘would no longer have to subsist on below-poverty-level incomes.’ Today, nearly 8 million people rely on the federal program for income.”
The Sad Fact: “Over the past five decades, Congress under both Republican and Democratic leadership has declined to make major changes to the program. The $85 outside-income limit, for instance, has never been adjusted to account for inflation.”
Bipartisan Bill: “As the 50th anniversary of SSI approaches this fall, Congress is deciding whether to make changes to the program. In an April 2021 letter to [President] Biden and Vice President Harris, more than 40 lawmakers lobbied them to raise cash benefits above the poverty level, increase the amount of money recipients can save, and eliminate reductions for taking help from loved ones, among other changes. . . A group of Republican and Democratic legislators have now proposed the SSI Savings Penalty Elimination Act, which would raise the asset limit for recipients from $2,000 to $10,000 for individuals and from $3,000 to $20,000 for couples.”
*** “Orlando Developing Plan for Age-Friendly Living,” by Carolyn Guniss, Orlando Sentinel (Sept.5, 2022): The Dek: After two years of assessing how to make Orlando a place its older residents can continue to call home, city staff will present for acceptance its findings to the council Sept. 12.
The Lede: “Its Livable Orlando Age‐Friendly Action Plan focuses on how to allow older residents to feel as comfortable and connected in Orlando as younger residents do, paying attention to areas such as housing, health, mobility and social interactions. . . The effort is tied to the city joining the AARP Network of Age‐Friendly States and Communities in 2019. The action plan phase is completed when it is sent to the World Health Organization. The plan is created to directly benefit the city’s older residents. . . , and roughly 10% of its residents are 65 years and older, according to the 2020 U.S. Census.”
Eight Focus Areas: “On Aug. 15, the council heard about the plan’s eight areas of focus: Outdoor Spaces & Buildings, Housing, Transportation/Mobility, Civic Participation & Employment, Respect & Social Inclusion, Social Participation, Community Support & Health Systems, and Communications & Information.”
So What? “A recent incident at an Orlando senior tower illuminated the need for the age-friendly plan. A bearing in the central air conditioning system broke in one of the two 15-story towers at Kinneret Apartments, a 380-unit, income-eligible complex for residents 62 and older with mobility issues, its website says. The apartments, developed in 1968 and 1972, are listed for sale. More than 160 senior apartments at the 515 Delaney Ave. location were without air for five days, during some of the hottest days of summer.”
Getting Hotter: “A study in the journal Communications & Environment [in August] said temperatures and humidity of 103 degrees should happen 20 to 50 times a year by 2050. Couple that with the six months of hurricane season in Florida and cooling issues will continue to be a concern for state and local governments and the not-for-profits focused on older adult quality-of-life issues and environmental justice.
“The Orlando initiative addresses challenges for older residents as it relates to cooling for homeowners and multi-unit buildings and public spaces. For instance, seniors will be able to access low-interest loans for sustainable improvements made to their homes through the Solar and Energy Loan Fund (SELF).”
Orlando’s Plans: Older adults will be considered in the planning of parks that will include providing shady areas and water features such as splash pads. The city will be “investing in a transportation system that reduces pollution and provides protection from… exposure to extreme heat. The city plans to have resilience hubs, where seniors can go to get cool and charge their phones after a disaster.”
*** “Amazing Grace: A Philadelphia Woman Making a Difference in Guatemala,” by Susan Schaefer, PBS Next Avenue (Sept. 8.2022): The Dek: Mary Grace Gardner, 70, has created a popular fair trade vendor stand featuring items from Guatemala — with the profits impacting her adopted community of Santa Cruz.
The Lede: “Known in her second home of Guatemala as Graciela, hometown Philadelphians call her Grace or ‘Sister’ Grace. Without exaggeration, this designation fits the radiant, resolute crusader and purveyor of global wares who specializes in those from the Central American countries of Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador and especially her beloved Guatemala.”
The Nutshell: “Gardner’s trader commerce supports local Guatemalan villagers. Her history of commissioning, purchasing and single-handedly creating a market for their traditional craft work has been widely shared. She’s operated a ‘fair trade’ system long before such a term existed, ploughing generous profits directly back to the Guatemalan villagers. . . Gardner sells her wares well below market prices to benefit her loyal stateside clients. Twelve years ago, she formalized this philanthropy by partnering with the non-profit organization, Fair Trade Philadelphia, initiating a fund for the village children.”
4. GOOD SOURCES
*** “Long Covid” is the theme of the September-October 2022 issue of Generations Today, the bimonthly from the American Society on Aging. The seven articles by experts in aging span essential topic areas around this emergent concern resulting from the not-over-yet pandemic.
The issue begins with “Long COVID: A Brief Overview” by Yale Medical School’s Erica Spatz, MD, MHS, a Principal Investigator of a CDC-funded study on Long COVID funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Among the other articles are “In COVID’s Wake: Which illnesses most often follow Long COVID and how do they tend to affect older adults?” and “Aging and Long COVID: Stopping Stigma with Concrete Strategies: Ageism not only affects daily life, but also life post-COVID—what follows are ideas for avoiding it when seeking medical help.”
Other address retirement and disability considerations, brain fog, and the Biden administration’s “Action Plan” for people with long Covid. Age discrimination, of course, comes with the many inherent biases in the health care system. Confronting the issue here is the essay, “Ageism’s Toll in the Age of COVID,” by Margaret Morganroth Gullette, author of Ending Ageism, or How Not to Shoot Old People (Rutgers University Press, 2017).
*** Invisible and Aging America: “I think it’s worse,” stated Kevin Prindiville. “Aging gets less attention from policy makers, which is a form of ageism. It’s invisibility, and older people . . . and aging issues were not as visible as when I started. That makes no sense. The issues from a policy perspective are much more important now than they were 20 years ago because of the growing need and what that means for systems and how we prepare and how we provide services. The invisibility is greater at a time when it should be more visible.”
Prindiville is one of the nation’s leading legal eagles in aging and a member of Gov. Gavin Newsom’s committee to develop the 10-year California Master Plan for Aging. He explained how that blue ribbon commission produced a template for states to address critical issues for the rapidly aging population. And he described how the state administration’s previously aging-oblivious sphere changed as they became better informed by the Master Plan committee members. Their ongoing interaction with officials enabled them to confront ageist policies that emerged with the Covid pandemic, and they eventually persuaded the governor not to enact many budgetary cuts that would have affected older Californians.
Prindiville, spoke on July’s Journalists in Aging Fellowship online panel, “OK, Boomer Bashers: Beating Ageism Through Policy, Programs and Planning.” GBONews.org, a cosponsor of the program, previously linked to that panel’s Zoom recording, but now we added a full transcript. [PDF: https://www.geron.org/images/gsa/documents/ok_boomer_bashers_transcript.pdf ]
The panel, moderated by journalist Rich Eisenberg, former managing editor of PBS Next Avenue, also included the co-authors of the recent JAMA Network Open study on “Experiences of Everyday Ageism and the Health of Older US Adults,” Julie Ober Allen, MPH, PhD, of the University of Oklahoma, and Erica Solway, PhD, MSW, MPH, Associate Director, National Poll on Healthy Aging at the University of Michigan’s Institute for Healthcare Policy & Innovation. Also speaking was Eunice Lin Nichols, recently was named Encore’s Co-CEO with the nonprofit’s founder and author Marc Freeman.
5 Goals for 2030
Prindiville executive director of Justice in Aging, outlined the goals and initial accomplishments of the California Master Plan for Aging’, the state’s 10-year plan to fortify its agencies to serve the Golden State’s rapidly aging population. “In 2030, California will be home to about 10.8 million people, age 60 and over. That’s twice as many as, as there were in the state in 2010,” said.
California is the first of several states to develop such a plan, and for reporters nationwide, the Golden State’s Master Plan offers a detailed template of potential questions to raise about what each state is doing to address issues in five broad areas: “housing for all stages and ages, health reimagined, inclusion and equity, isolation caregiving that works and affording aging,” Prindiville said.
He described the state’s five major goals for 2030 (housing, health, inclusion and equity, caregiving, affordability) and how they provide reporters a sort of template of questions for their own state authorities. The Master Plan was released in January 2020, just as the pandemic began and as the state faced huge deficits. The members of the Master Plan committee’s ongoing working groups were able to address emerging policy concern, and were able to address persuade the government not to enact planned budget cuts to programs for seniors.
Prindiville stated, “Even though older adults were the people most likely to be affected most likely to die, we saw it come up over and over and over again in the Covid response: a failure to see the needs of the community and then connections and intersectionality for the community.”
He explained, “This group ended up [working] closely with the administration to identify needs of older adults in the Covid crisis and ways that the policy response was coming up short. So we worked on issues like consumer protections, safety, rights to visitation for people in nursing homes. We worked on issues like the crisis-standards of care that California created that at first were deeply ageist. The group worked to rewrite those rules with the administration during the COVID crisis.”
(A troubling development was that California’s health department initially sent medical facilities triage rules indicating they should first provide limited emergency resources, such as ventilators, to younger Covid victims, with the tacit assumption that preserving older lives was a lesser goal.)
Prindiville continued, “The state had first thought that there was going be a massive budget crisis. So there were proposals to slash funding for aging services right in the middle of Covid, in May of 2020. So this group fought off those efforts and met with the governor and convinced him to change his mind on those cuts.” As the pandemic settled down somewhat, the state found its projected tax liability reversed. Instead of a giant deficit, it had an enormous tax surplus, especially from Covid’s big boost to online business and other factors. They were able to persuade the administration to start applying some of those surpluses to elements of the Master Plan.
“Significant New Investments”
Prindiville went on, “That’s led to some really significant new investments in aging” in the 2020, 2021 and 2022 budgets. “We’ve seen new investments in the areas of housing, in expansions of the MediCal [California’s Medicaid] program, in billions of dollars of planning money for expanding home- and community-based services expansions of Older Californians Act services. So the timing ended up being very good in that we were kind of in the right place to help with Covid response.” Along with federal stimulus dollars, he said, they were able to “jumpstart the implementation of the Master Plan.”
While targeting inequities in access to care by 2030, he said, the plan’s implementation aims to establish that every state policy issue “that is a life issue is also an aging issue,” Prindiville declared. “You know, like homelessness, transportation, food security, caregiving — every part of living is touching older adults, making sure every part of work that happens within the state government touches older adults. Even something like education, which is so youth centric, of course: Older adults are learning throughout their lives,” such as by returning to school to prepare for new jobs, or continuing their education.
This past June, the Center for Health Care Strategies published its guide to states titled, “Developing a Master Plan for Aging,” for “addressing the needs of older adults, people with disabilities, and caregivers, for 10 years or more.”
So far, besides California, Colorado, Massachusetts, Minnesota, and Texas have developed these plans, with others in the works in New York and Vermont. GBONews would like to hear of others, so drop us a note, if your state is looking into it. If not, ask why not—and you may get a good story.
*** “A Valuable New Framework For Improving The Care Of Older Adults,” by Howard Gleckman, Forbes (Sept. 7. 2022): The Lede: “Imagine, for a moment, a functioning, well-developed system for improving the lives of frail older adults. Imagine that, instead of our current chaotic, dangerous, and needlessly expensive patchwork of care for seniors, the U.S. had a well-coordinated care model that leverages and supports paid aides, family caregivers, safe and appropriate housing, and new technology.”
The Nutshell: “For the past year, a broadly diverse group of long-term care policy experts have been working to develop such a framework. Today, they released the results of their labors, done under the auspices of The Convergence Center for Policy Resolution. Full disclosure: I served as a member of the group’s steering committee. . . The report, called ‘Improving Care for Older Adults,’ is more of a broad framework for reform than a step-by-step cookbook.”
Takeaways for Reporters: For this expert committee, Gleckman, a senior fellow at The Urban Institute and author of Caring for Our Parents, was among a Who’s Who of authorities representing the industrial-academic-nonprofit field of eldercare. For some journalists it will appear to be a well-meaning, but jargon-filled, outline of 16 pages. But those willing to excavate for nuggets will find that it offers a checklist of perspectives by leaders in the realm of health care and aging. Gleckman’s article in Forbes, where he is a regular contributor, and the report itself, include links to other studies that provide background and explanations of some of the more oblique allusions in the “Improving Care” document.
“Five Essential Themes”: “Improving Care for Older Adults” outlines these themes: “Care settings: Older adults need appropriate, safe, and supportive housing as they age. Better integrating long–term care into communities: Government should encourage models that better link subsidized housing with long-term care and health care. Family caregivers: Policymakers should recognize the central role played by family and friends. Direct care workers: Along with family members, direct care aides and others providing paid personal supports and services are the backbone of the long-term care system. Funding: Medicaid payments for low-income long-stay nursing home residents must be adequate to support quality care. It also will require a fully-funded public catastrophic long-term care insurance program that meshes with private insurance and Medicaid.
*** The Elder Index: Useful as the “Improving Care . . .” overview and supporting document links may be, reporters need to keep their eyes on the even more fundamental issues. For instance, the section on improving access to home and community-based services doesn’t begin to touch on the crisis in American housing, even the federal government’s decades-long failure to build or much support construction and maintenance of senior and other public housing. For a tutorial on five more essential areas of insecurity for aging America (housing, food, transportation, beyond-inflationary health care, and “miscellaneous” costs from clothing to internet), check out the Elder Index (“Measuring the income older adults need to live independently”), created by UMass Boston Gerontology Institute.
5. WORDS FROM THE WISE
Modern Man is the victim of the very instruments he values most. Every gain in power, every mastery of natural forces, every scientific addition to knowledge, has proved potentially dangerous, because it has not been accompanied by equal gains in self-understanding and self-discipline.
–Lewis Mumford, the great 20th century thinker and environmentalist, quoted by Harry “Rick” Moody, editor of the Human Values in Aging email newsletter.
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 2022 JNG. For more information contact GBO Editor Paul Kleyman.
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