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Thinking Policy

Access to an employer-based, payroll-deduction retirement savings plan plays a key role in allowing people to save for the future. Yet nearly half of American workers, or about 56 million, do not have access to such a plan. To address this challenge, in recent years a growing number of states have…
In a recent AARP focus group, Malcolm (name changed for privacy), a 64-year-old man with health insurance through his employer and a preexisting condition, shared how over the course of a year, he received two low-balance medical bills he couldn’t afford to pay. The bills went to collection, which…
New AARP research finds that about half of American working adults, or about 56 million people, lack access to a payroll-deduction workplace retirement savings plan, making it much more difficult for them to save for retirement. Small business employees, workers with low-to-moderate earnings, and…
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.
Since the passage of the Nutrition Labeling and Education Act of 1990, Nutrition Facts labeling has been mandatory for most packaged foods. The majority of food items sold in grocery stores are processed and packaged. Nutrition Facts labels provide consumers with the amount of calories and…
There’s good news for consumers interested in taking more control of their health care.