By Geralyn Magan
The LTSS Center recommends that you put these 5 articles on your reading list for October.
ON-SITE HEALTH CARE COULD HELP SENIORS STAY AT HOME
Housing plus services models were front and center recently when Stateline published an article focusing on Weinberg Villages in Owings Mills, MD.
Weinberg Villages is an affordable senior housing community participating in the 3-year Integrated Wellness in Supportive Housing (IWISH) demonstration funded by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). The demonstration is bringing service coordinators and health care workers to HUD-assisted senior housing communities to help residents “stay out of emergency rooms and nursing homes,” reports Stateline.
The LeadingAge LTSS Center @UMass Boston is part of the HUD project’s Implementation Team.
The Stateline article offers a first-hand view of IWISH benefits at Weinberg Villages and Allen Temple Arms in Oakland, CA. Staff writer Teresa Wiltz asks Alisha Sanders, the LTSS Center’s director of housing and services policy research, to describe what will happen when the IWISH funding runs out in 2020.
Her assessment? It will be difficult to find money for IWISH in the private health market because residents typically have different insurance providers and health care providers, and health providers aren’t currently motivated to pay for wellness and prevention programs that yield future savings.
WHAT SHOULD SOCIAL INSURANCE FOR LONG-TERM CARE LOOK LIKE?
Howard Gleckman, senior fellow at the Urban Institute, describes the “3 basic flavors” of public long-term care insurance in a recent column for Forbes. Those social insurance programs could cover front-end risk, catastrophic risk, or both.
“If we had unlimited resources (and unlimited public acceptance of tax increases), a fully comprehensive public insurance program would be ideal,” writes Gleckman. “But it would be much too costly.”
Front-end coverage “may discourage people from planning for their own needs,” writes Gleckman. The back-end, catastrophic model, refined by Judy Feder of Georgetown University and Marc Cohen, co-director of the LeadingAge LTSS Center @UMass Boston, focuses on people with the greatest need, he says. But it would cover fewer people.
Gleckman suggests that policy makers could choose an entirely different route: more aggressively integrating medical treatment with social supports and services in a single comprehensive benefit. But this model has challenges too, he says.
“Thinking about how to design a public long-term care program requires answering lots of questions,” concludes Gleckman. “The very good news is: Policy makers are starting to ask them.”
WHY AREN’T MORE WOMEN WORKING? THEY’RE CARING FOR PARENTS
The United States ranked 17th among Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries for the participation of prime-age women in the work force, according to a recent article in The New York Times . By 2017, that ranking dropped to 30th.
“Economists say the virtual absence of support for eldercare is a prime suspect in explaining why the share of women taking part in the labor force stalled in the late 1990s after rising relentlessly for 50 years,” writes economics reporter Eduardo Porter.
The article contains some sobering statistics about caregiving in the United States and cites a recent study, published by the National Academy of Social Insurance (NASI), which explores ways the young, old, and sick could be added to America’s social insurance package. Marc Cohen, co-director of the LeadingAge LTSS Center @UMass Boston chaired one of the NASI study’s working groups.
The Times examines one proposal, considered by NASI, that would cover child-care expenses that exceeded 7% of household income, part of the salary of people who took leave to care for a relative, and about $36,500 of long-term care over a lifetime.
“This would not cover the entire tab faced by families, but it would go a long way toward easing their financial strain,” writes Porter.
WHY AMERICA IS FAILING TO FEED ITS AGING
Nearly 8% of Americans 60 and older—or 5.5 million older adults—were “food insecure” in 2017. That number has more than doubled since 2001 and is only expected to grow as America grow older, according to a recent article by Laura Ungar and Trudy Lieberman of Kaiser Health News.
The article, published by Time magazine, documents how government relief—including the Older Americans Act (OAA)—is falling short of fulfilling the growing need. For example:
- Nutrition services under the OAA dropped by 8% over the past 18 years when adjusted for inflation. Home-delivered and group meals have decreased by nearly 21 million since 2005.
- Most people facing food insecurity (83%) do not get any meal services under the OAA.
- More than 17% of black seniors and 16% of Hispanic seniors are food insecure, compared with fewer than 7% of white seniors.
OLDER PEOPLE ARE IGNORED AND DISTORTED IN AGEIST MARKETING
More than a third of the United States population is older than 50, but the group turns up in only 15% of media images, according to a recent report from AARP. The AARP research, reported in The New York Times, was based on a random sample of 1,116 images published or posted by popular brands and groups. Among the findings:
- Only 13% of the images reviewed by AARP showed older people working, even though people over age 50 make up a third of the American labor force.
- Less than 5% of the images showed older generations handling technology, even though the Pew Research Center has found that 69% of people between 55 and 73 own a smartphone.
MORE READING MATERIAL
Interested in doing more reading? Visit News That Caught Our Eye on the LTSS Center website.