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Thinking Policy
Most of the 1.2 million people living with HIV in the United States are now over the age of 50, and more than 175,000 are over the age of 65. For many people who were diagnosed prior to the introduction of revolutionary highly active antiretroviral therapy, life expectancy was measured in months,…
Surveys illuminate people’s preferences for aging in place and reforms that promote more supply
A recent report by the influential Medicare Payment Advisory Commission (MedPAC) — the independent agency that advises Congress on Medicare policy — finds that Medicare pays 20 percent more per enrollee in a private Medicare Advantage (MA) plan than it would if that same individual was instead…
After attending a 2011 U.S. Senate Special Committee on Aging hearing where my report on the cost of exploitation was quoted, I discussed the growing problem of financial exploitation with a banker. In minutes over a burger, we identified a way a family caregiver could watch over a loved one’s bank…
“He’s been in the hospital about 18 times over the past two years. Leaving the hospital the first time was particularly scary because he came home with drains from his wounds. They had to be cleaned frequently. I had a few lessons in the hospital, but I wasn’t prepared for doing it myself when we…
Can technology transform aging in America? It’s a compelling question, and in fact I recently participated in a panel discussion with that very title. The panel, hosted by Politico, discussed community-based care and technological innovations to help older adults age in their own homes and…
While family caregiving is an intensely personal issue, it is critically important to the well-being of our aging U.S. population, families and society — and must be taken seriously as a critical issue of public policy.
Social Security surfaces in the news regularly — in all kinds of ways. As summer 2016 wound down, news broke concerning an 80-year-old homeless woman named Wanda Witter who, after two decades of battle and with the support of AARP’s Legal Counsel for the Elderly, proved that the government owed her…
Two hundred twenty-eight years.
Final Department of Labor (DOL) regulations have opened the way for the largest expansion of retirement plan coverage in several decades. The regulations provide much-needed guidance to states that want to establish state-sponsored automatic IRA plans for small-business employees. Earlier, DOL…
The images are clear in my mind, in spite of the decades that have passed: my grandmother, waking up well before the sun rose in Haiti, lifting up her basket of goods and placing it over her head, and heading off to the marketplace. In the evenings, I’d see her return, exhausted after a long day…
A recent study on the pioneering National Family Caregiver Support Program finds that over the past 15 years, the program has accelerated the development of local services and supports to help caregiving families. This is good news; before the NFCSP became law, only half the states reported…
I stood at the locked door of my family’s favorite neighborhood restaurant and peered in the window. How could it not be open on a Friday evening, I wondered.
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