GBONEWS: Wash Post Columnist to Keynote GSA in Boston; John Oliver Hits Medicare Advantage; “60 Minutes” Profiles Dr. Millionaire for Billionaires; AARP’s $9 Billion Insurance Deal; Bill McKibben’s Intergenerational Fossils; Texas Rural Seniors Get Climate Aid; Poorest Elders Die 9 Years Before Rich
GENERATIONS BEAT ONLINE NEWS
E-News of the Journalists Network on Generations.
October 28, 2025 — Volume 32, Number 14
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.
In This Issue: No Rescissions for Old Age.
1. NEWS ON GSA NATIONAL CONFERENCE: *** Dr. Francis Collins, MD, Withdraws as Keynoter; Washinton Post Columnist Dr. Leana Wen to Open; *** Comp Media Registrations and Access to Online Program Available.
2. THE STORYBOARD:
*** “Medicare Advantage,” Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, HBO;
*** “Older Americans bring energy, experience to anti-Trump activism,” MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow interview’s Third Act founder Bill McKibben;
*** “New Texas energy package could help older adults in long-term care facilities during extreme weather,” by Madeline de Figueiredo, The Daily Yonder rural news service; *** CBS “60 Minutes’” Dismaying Profile of Longevity Lifestyle Doc, with Nora O’Donnell.
3. AGING IN AMERICA NEWS: *** “Investigating the Outliers” (social ties and longevity research); *** “Care Is Resistance,” Parts I & 2 — Linked Q&A’s with Anna Wadia, executive director of The CARE Fund, and Kevin Prindiville, executive director of Justice senior poverty law center”; *** “Disability Benefits at Risk,” by Liz Seegert (Oct. 6, 2025).
4. GEN BEATLES NEWS: *** Albuquerque Journal Exec Editor Jay Newton-Small, 49, has first baby; *** Charles Piller Wins Victor Cohn Prize for Excellence in Medical Science Reporting; **** AARP Policy Chief Debra Whitmanreceives Living Now Book Awards Gold Medal for book, The Second Fifty.
5. GOOD SOURCES: *** “The 80%: Low-Income Older Adults Die 9 Years Earlier than Those with Greatest Wealth,” by Jane Tavares, PhD; Marc Cohen, PhD, et al, LeadingAge LTSS Center at UMass Boston and National Council on Aging; *** “UnitedHealth and AARP Shake Hands on $9 Billion Deal,” by Wendell Potter, Health Care Uncovered.
1. NEWS ON GSA NATIONAL CONFERENCE
Dr. Francis Collins Withdraws as Keynoter; Washington Post Columnist Dr. Leana Wen to Open; Comp Media Registrations and Access to Online Program Available.
*** The Gerontological Society of America has announced that Francis Collins, MD, PhD, has withdrawn as the Opening Plenary keynoter for the association’s Annual Scientific Meeting in Boston, Nov. 12-15. The Human Genome Project pioneer and former National Institutes of Health director withdraw “due to a personal commitment.”
Stepping in as keynoter will be Washinton Post health and health policy columnist Leana Wen, MD, MSc, of George Washington University, who also, anchors the Post’s newsletter, “The Checkup with Dr. Wen.” She’s the author of two books, most recently, Lifelines: A Doctor’s Journey in the Fight for Public Health (Metropolitan Books, 2021).
According to Wen’s website, “An immigrant from China, she and her family received food stamps and were at times homeless despite her parents working multiple jobs. That child went on to attend college at 13, become a Rhodes Scholar, and turned to public health as the way to make a difference in the country that had offered her such possibilities.”
*** Complimentary Media Registrations and Online Program Access: Reporters for GSA’s conference at Boston’s John B. Hynes Veterans Memorial Convention Center. With hundreds of lectures, panels, plus thousands of research papers and virtually every aspect of longevity, this conference attracts more than 4,000 gerontologists from almost 50 countries. It’s the Fancy Food Show of trends and developments on aging, from cellular science to public policy.
Reporters unable to attend in person may still review the meeting’s full scientific program of new research findings, which is searchable for speakers from your area and topics of your editorial interest.
Those attending onsite may attend several special activities organized for reporters. AARP will present a breakfast briefing on their new “Caregiving in the U.S.” report, on Thursday, Nov. 13. Also that day, GSA will hold a lunch briefing on its new report, “Concentric Value of Vaccination: Intersecting Health, Economic, and Societal Benefits.
An evening networking reception for journalists is set for Friday, Nov. 14. GBONews readers who have seen our reports about this years’ Journalists in Aging Fellows Program will be able to meet and mingle with the 2025-26 Fellows and the program’s organizers with a stem and some tasty bites.
For more information, contact GSA Communications Director Todd Kluss, tkluss@geron.org; (202-) 587-2839.
2. THE STORYBOARD
*** “Medicare Advantage,” Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, HBO (Oct. 26, 2025): The Dek—“John Oliver details what Medicare Advantage is, why it basically has all the pitfalls of private insurance, and the economic significance of novelty slippers.”
An Oliver Quote: “While these plans can be great for companies’ bottom lines, they can be woefully insufficient for those who signed up for them and the providers who have to deal with them. Medicare Advantage basically has all the problems of private insurance but applied to a more vulnerable population.”
Source Links: Wendell Potter’s HEALTH CARE un-covered! Substack praised the program and included “a list of the sources cited in the segment,” ranging from the progressive More Perfect Union to the Wall Street Journal to the MedPAC agency’s most recent “Medicare Advantage program: Status report.”
*** “Older Americans bring energy, experience to anti-Trump activism,” “Rachel Maddow Show,” MSNBC (Oct. 17, 2025):
Intro — Bill McKibben, author, climate organizer and founder of the 60+ advocacy group, Third Act, spoke of the “strong representation of older Americans among anti-Trump protesters, and how the combination of personal experience and roots in civic activism has energized the older generation to speak out about the abuses and backsliding in the Trump era.”
Maddow noted that when the news outlet, Notice News asked McKibben whether he was concerned that elders protesting with Third Act might be labeled as “domestic terrorists,” he told them, “Our average age is in the mid-70s. I think our gray-haired presence alone will help make it clear what nonsense this is.”
He observed that many older people at demonstrations, such as No Kings, have lived experience observing as many as 15 presidents back to Franklin D. Roosevelt. They know that Donald Trump “is utterly different from every president that we’ve ever lived through before, good or bad, that this is a complete rupture with the America that we knew.”
McKibben paraphrased White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, who derided “all these elderly hippies, who are out there yelling at us and remarked, “Time for them to go take a nap.” The environmentalist asserted, “Well, we’re not taking a nap; we’re rising up.”
McKibben added, “We’ve noticed all along that there’s an enormous pleasure for younger people in seeing that older people, Boomers, the Silent Generation, are not abandoning them, leaving the mess behind for them to clean up but are showing up and trying to do something about it.”
In Boston, when a high school students “asked us to come along” to a climate-change rally, “All the kids who saw it started laughing” when the seniors lofted a banner stating, “Fossils against fossil fuels.” Laughter is the best intergenerational glue.
*** “New Texas energy package could help older adults in long-term care facilities during extreme weather,” by Madeline de Figueiredo, The Daily Yonder rural news service (Oct. 20, 2025):
The Lede: “A growing body of research warns that climate disasters are disproportionately dangerous for older adults, especially those in long-term care settings who rely on others for essential support. Those risks are often compounded in rural areas, where resources are scarce and emergency support is slower to arrive.
Research: “A 2025 report from the Federation of American Scientists found that rural communities faced heightened risks from extreme heat, with residents more likely to have pre-existing health conditions, limited healthcare access, and older or substandard housing. . . .
A 2025 study published in Natural Hazards Review further found that rural communities hit by natural disasters faced significantly longer power outage recovery times than urban areas, highlighting how limited infrastructure and resources can leave rural populations disproportionately vulnerable.”
The Texas Law: “In response to such risks, the Texas Legislature authorized $1.8 billion this year for the Texas Backup Power Package, an initiative aimed at strengthening energy resilience through backup power systems and microgrids in critical facilities, including those in rural areas. The program, funded through the broader Texas Energy Fund, was designed to ensure that essential services like nursing homes, hospitals, and water systems are better equipped to remain operational during future grid emergencies.”
The Gap: “Andrea Earl, associate state director of advocacy and outreach at AARP Texas, said older adults in care facilities faced heightened risks during extreme temperatures because their bodies struggle to regulate heat and cold. . . Medication, medical equipment needs, and social isolation further increased vulnerability to extreme temperatures.”
*** “Dr. Peter Attia on how to make your final decade of life as enjoyable as possible,” CBS “60 Minutes,” Nora O’Donnell reporting, producers: Keith Sharman, Roxanne Feitel (Oct. 26, 2025): This dismaying puff piece could just as well have been gooped up with the header, “Longevity Styles of the Rich and Famous.” Atria, a Stanford physician has become Dr. Millionaire to the Billionaires.
Having such a practice earns an OK American style. No harm, if in private practice. But the underlying big-time journalistic notion that the basic message of more healthy living is for everyone is bogus on its face.
As my colleague, Liz Seegert commented on Facebook, Atria’s prescription of “regular exercise, disease prevention, addressing mental health and better nutrition are well known to keep people healthier and improve longevity. Don’t think anyone needs to pay over $100K to figure this out.”
This editor wonders how many people will be discouraged, knowing they will never have access to all of Attia’s fancy-tech tests and coaching? While lifestyle features as glossy as “Vanity Fair” ads entertain the pallid rich, millions of Americans, young and old, are being denied access to healthy lives by their low wages, rising prices, food deserts, unsafe walking environments, and an unscalable mountain of daily stresses that their conditions end up in emergency rooms — started his career Dr. Attia. Those factors drive up the cost of health care for everyone and cost them their own capacity to contribute to their communities, socially and economically.
I fault Attia in this less than I do “60 Minutes.” Just listen to how Nora O’Donnell vaguely mentions medical crisis, with no actual sources, and allows Attia to shrug them off because his medical education (Johns Hopkins, Stanford) included no course offerings in exercise or nutrition. He could add the paltry U.S. education in geriatrics when he was in med school 25 years ago, too, but maybe that connection is too hard for him to see beneath his – and “60 Minutes’” elevated brow.
3. AGING IN AMERICA NEWS
Launched in February 2025, AginginAmericaNews.org is the brain-boom of journalist Mark Swartz. An independent news site, AiANews offers free subscriptions to its feed of multiple weekly stories and expert interviews about “the urgent issues facing seniors, their families, their communities, and the care workforce,” according to their website.
Swartz is a veteran education writer for zero2eight (formerly Early Learning Nation). Now 57, the GenXer found his way to the richly varied but under-covered longevity revolution while he and his brother were emersed in family care for their mother.
In his “Manifesto,” Swartz writes, “We lack the infrastructure and policy framework to adequately care for today’s seniors, let alone the projected increases in the coming years. Demographic, social, and economic trends virtually guarantee a society-wide reckoning over what aging looks like in our country. Solutions exist” from experts in government, academia, advocates, architects, designers, authors, artists and technologists, who “are reimagining narratives around growing old.”
Journalists will find AiANews to be a fertile source of authoritative voices, organizations and historical perspectives on a wide range of story topics. (Along with its website, readers can join AiANews’ LinkedIn group for continuing news notices.)
Although only in its modest beginnings, AiANews is making an impressive start, and GBONews plans to let our readers know about and link to some or its ongoing headlines. Swartz has been selected for the 2025-26 Journalists in Aging Fellows Program, a collaboration of GBONews’ publisher, the Journalists Network on Generations and the Gerontological Society of America.
Following are some recent AiANews posts:
*** “Investigating the Outliers” – “In Healthy to 100: How Strong Social Ties Lead to Long Lives (Public Affairs, October 2025) longevity expert Ken Stern explores ‘the world’s healthiest countries’—Singapore, Japan, South Korea, Italy, and Spain.”
The Podcast: “The book really began with my podcast, Century Lives [from the Stanford Center on Longevity] It’s a documentary podcast, not an interview podcast.”
Outliers? Harvard’s Raj Chetty has done much work “on the correlation between county-level income and life expectancy He explained, “There’s a very close connection between the two, but there are outliers. These are places that were overperforming based upon where they should be in life expectancy and income. . . . Everywhere we went, the story . . . wasn’t about nutrition or exercise or access to health care. What really made them stand apart were the levels of social connection.”
*** “Care Is Resistance,” Part I — Q&A with Anna Wadia, executive director of The CARE Fund, a collaborative fund bringing together foundations across the care continuum, and Kevin Prindiville, executive director of Justice in Aging, which fights “senior poverty through law.” And “Show Up and Listen,” Part II.
Key Quotes: Wadia — “There are many ways in which the CARE Fund’s grantees are pushing back . . . At the federal level, there’s continued advocacy to undo some of the most draconian cuts to programs like Medicaid. While states can never make up for the shortfall from the federal government, very wealthy individuals and corporations are receiving massive federal tax cuts. So that can be an opening for states to increase taxes and raise revenue to make up for some of the cuts.”
Prindiville — “Every state Medicaid director we’ve worked with has been looking for ways that they can shift more of their long-term care into homes and communities.”
*** “Disability Benefits at Risk,” by Liz Seegert (Oct. 6, 2025): The Dek – “Proposed Changes Could Cut Off Half a Million Older Workers.”
The Lede: “The Social Security Administration is proposing regulatory changes that could dramatically restrict access to disability benefits for hundreds of thousands of Americans, particularly workers over age 50 who develop serious health conditions late in their careers.
The Impact: A September report from the Urban Institute found that the forthcoming rule could reduce eligibility for Social Security Disability Insurance by as much as 20% overall, and up to 30% among older age groups. Even under a more moderate model that reduces eligibility by just 10%, roughly 500,000 people would lose SSDI benefits over the next decade, including 80,000 widows and children who depend on those benefits.”
4. GEN BEATLES NEWS
*** Modern-age Mom, Jay Newton-Small, 49, gave birth to her first child, Graham Bailey, on Sept. 25. Newton-Small, Executive Editor of the Albuquerque Journal previously founded the former life-story company, Memory Well, which helped families having a loved one with dementia become more familiar to nursing home staff.
A former Washington correspondent for Time Magazine and Bloomberg, she’s the author of Broad Influence: How Women Are Changing the Way America Works (Time Home Entertainment, 2016). Graham loves napping on the lap of daddy, James Baliley, whom Jay married in 2022.
*** Charles Piller has won the 2025 Victor Cohn Prize for Excellence in Medical Science Reporting from the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing. Pillar noted in a LinkedIn post, “The prize was not for my book, Doctored: Fraud, Arrogance, and Tragedy in the Quest to Cure Alzheimer’s (Atria/One Signal Publishers, 2025). Instead, he wrote, it “recognizes key stories that helped frame that larger narrative” as a writer for Science Magazine.
He explained, “My goal: Help readers see that the process of discovery, which I revere, depends on honest science.” The honor comes with $5,000, plus travel expenses to attend the presentation ceremony at the ScienceWriters conference in Chicago, Nov. 9.
Victor Cohn (1919-2000) was the signature science and medical reporter/columnist for the Washington Post and, earlier, the Minneapolis Tribune. A fierce stickler for clear and accurate science writing, he was instrumental in setting the highest standard of scientific reportage.
*** Kudos go to Debra Whitman, PhD, for receiving a 2025 Living Now Book Awards Gold Medal (Mature Living/Caregiving category) for her book, The Second Fifty: Answers to the 7 Big Questions of Midlife and Beyond (W.W. Norton & Company, 2024). Whitman, AARP’s Chief Public Policy Officer, said in the prize announcement, “Midlife and beyond is not an ending, it’s a powerful stage of life filled with growth and possibility.”
This editor stated in our GBONews.org review of the book last January, “Whitman’s middle-class background and deep knowledge of age-based policy concerns afford readers a more informed and nuanced grasp of the possibilities – and difficulties – lying ahead, amidst the rapid aging of America.” I even gave a copy to my 50-something daughter.
5. GOOD SOURCES
*** “The 80%: Low-Income Older Adults Die 9 Years Earlier than Those with Greatest Wealth,” by Jane Tavares, PhD; Marc Cohen, PhD; and Maryssa Pallis, MBA, MPP, MS of the LeadingAge LTSS Center at UMass Boston; and Kerry Glova, MPA, MSW; and Reena Sethi, DrPH, MHS of the National Council on Aging.
The “Issue Brief” for this study states, “Limited personal wealth in the United States manifests not just as financial difficulties, found that 80% of Americans age 60 and over (or approximately 34 million households) would not be able to withstand a financial shock such as a divorce, a serious health setback, or having to pay for long-term services and supports. There are 43 million households headed by an older adult in the country.”
The Bottom Line: “This year’s update finds a sizable difference in mortality rate and mortality age by wealth. . . . Those in the bottom quintile died an average of 9 years earlier than those in the highest decile. . . These findings suggest that the more financial resources older adults have, the longer they live.”
The Upshot: “In the United States, large, sudden losses of net worth are common. The risk of experiencing, such a financial shock intensifies in older age. . . . Over a 20-year period, more than 25% of adults age 50 and over will experience a shock resulting in a 75% or more drop in net wealth. Among adults age 70 and older, more than two-thirds will experience at least one negative shock with financial consequences over a nine-year period. In 2022, around half of older adults reported lacking the savings needed to respond to an emergency or financial shock.”
*** “UnitedHealth and AARP Shake Hands on $9 Billion Deal,” by Wendell Potter from his blog, Health Care Uncovered (Oct. 21, 2025): The Dek: “Behind the Capitol Hill photo ops and consumer-friendly slogans, AARP, America’s most trusted seniors’ group, has close financial ties with America’s largest health care conglomerate.”
The Lede: “In 2024, UnitedHealth Group (UNH) — the nation’s largest health insurer — paid AARP a one-time upfront royalty payment of just over $9 billion for the rights to use AARP’s name in marketing Medicare Advantage-type plans and Medicare supplement policies. According to financial statements for AARP, this windfall came as part of a restructured deal with UNH’s insurance unit, UnitedHealthcare, extending their partnership for an additional 12 years and recording a balance of about $8.72 billion in deferred revenue as of December 31.”
Who? Wendell Potter, the former communications VP and self-described “whistleblower and reformed insurance propagandist” at Cigna, states, “UnitedHealth’s payment to AARP did not come as a modest licensing fee: The $9 billion is a one-time advance that will be drawn down over time. That’s a financial anchor and a dependency. It’s hard to believe that AARP’s advocacy will remain uninfluenced when a major revenue stream depends on the financial health of one of the largest insurers selling to seniors.”
He adds, “The point? If AARP is going to get another $9 billion from UnitedHealth someday, UnitedHealth has to keep extracting billions of dollars from taxpayers and Medicare beneficiaries. It’s a symbiotic relationship that benefits both AARP and UnitedHealth but not so much for the rest of us – and certainly not for the Medicare Trust Fund.”
His opinion piece focuses especially on “AARP’s lobbying expenditures totaled $11.75 million during just the first six months of this year,” according to the independent political watchdog, OpenSecrets.
This is only one informative report for reporters from Health Care Uncovered. Check it out.
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 2025 Paul Kleyman. For more information or to send news of stories or books (by you and others), fellowships, awards or pertinent kvetches, contact GBONews Editor Paul Kleyman [pfkleyman@gmail.com].
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