AgingOptions Blog

Housing

• Who do you love and where do you live? Shacking up is not just for kids anymore, MSNBC reports. The number of people over age 50 who are living together in romantic relationships but are not married has more than doubled over the past 10 years. Read more here.
• How do you compare? Senior housing and long-term care communities can be expensive. So how do most residents of these communities pay their expenses — and what are the costs they take on? Click for answers from a new survey of residents.
• Grandkids step in. More 20- and 30-somethings are caring for their grandparents than ever before. Click to read more.

Health

• Can you afford to be healthy? A new calculation says the average American couple should save $240,000 to cover health care costs while in retirement. Click to read more.
• Osteoporosis drugs could hurt your bones. Women who take anti-osteoporosis drugs may want to think twice about their bone-building pills. A new review finds that long-term use can actually weaken bones in some women, causing serious and devestating health problems. Click to read more.
• A sense of purpose and meaning in life may slow the advance of Alzheimer’s. Read more here.
• Do bigger muscles make a smarter brain? Research from the Laboratory of Neuroscience at the National Institute on Aging found that exercise training leads to better performance on tests of cognition. Click to read more.
• Poor care for older patients. Doctors are failing to ask basic questions and bring up simple interventions that could make a big difference in the health of Americans age 65 and older, accordign to a new poll. Click to see what your primary care physician should be doing — but may not be.
• Battling mumbo jumbo. Tired of hard-to-understand jargon on your Medicare summary notices? Thanks to a 92-year-old Ohio woman, those statements are about to get easier to read. Read more here.
• Eat fish for a healthy brain. People who eat more omega-3 fatty acids have less of the protein that researchers think may cauce Alzheimers. Most got the healthy fats from foods, not pills. Read more here.
• Cutting Medicaid to pay for wars. House Republicans unveiled their plan for the U.S. budget this week. It would cut Medicaid and other social programs to protect funding for the Pentagon. Click for more information.

Finance

• Social Security shortfalls. Social Security “faces a real, but manageable, shortfall, and stabilizing the system’s finances should be a high priority,” according to a new brief from Boston College’s Center for Retirement Research. The report found that Social Security’s deficit is significantlyhigher than a year ago, in part because of the slow economic recovery and and an increase in disability payouts. Read the full details here.
• More seniors choose to retire. Older Americans are leaving the workforce in large numbers, according to the lastest U.S. jobs reports. And it looks like many are choosing to retire, rather than to hunt for work in a tough labor market. Click to read more.
• Politicians ignore what real people want. Leaders in Washington, D.C., are making too many decisions about Social Security and Medicare behind closed doors, and are spending too little time listening to ordinary citizens, according to people polled in a recent survey commissioned by AARP. Read more here.
• Read this before you retire. What financial considerations do you need to keep in mind as you transition from full-time work to permanent retirement?  Click for an overview.

Legal

• Daughter has to pay dad’s nursing home bills. Diana Gaetano promised to use her dad’s money to pay his nursing home bills. When he died with $80,509.55 still owed to Springs Nursing & Rehabilitation Center, the home went after Gaetano — seeking payment out of her own account if his estate could not cover the bills. Now a New York appeals court has ruled that Gaetano can be held personally liable for her father’s unpaid bills, since she continued to use his assets to make mortgage, tax and other payments on a house he would clearly never live in again while failing to pay the home. Read more here.
• Sons sued over mom’s bills. A Connecticut nursing home can proceed with its lawsuit against two sons who accepted money from their mother while she failed to pay her bills. Her Medicaid application was denied because of those financial transfers. A trial court ruled that while they sons were not personally liable for their mothers’ debt, the son who promised to be responsible for her finances could be found liable for a breach of contract. Read more here.
• Don’t get kicked out of your care facility if you run out of cash. Seymour and Mildred Altman paid $393,970 to move in to their continuing care retrement community, with the understanding that if they ran into financial problems they could take advantage of a hardship discount. But when they tried to use that discount, Lifespace Communities balked, saying they needed a third party to guarantee their monthly costs. Now a federal district court has ruled that the continuing care retirement community cannot require third-party guarantee of existing residents of its independent living units. Read more here.
• Are your kids on the hook? A Pennsylvania appeals court has found a son liable for his mother’s $93,000 nursing home bill under that state’s law. She entered the nursing home temporarily after a car crash, then left the country without paying her full bill. Pennsylvania’s filial responsibility law requires adult children to provide support for their indigent parents. Read more here. Florida’s just one of 30 states with filial responsibility laws. Here’s the full list.

Never Too Old to Play

May is Older Americans Month. Since 1963, communities across the U.S. have taken time out in May to celebrate the contributions that elders make. This year’s theme is “Never Too Old to Play,” and is part of a broad national effort to keep older Americans active and engaged. Read more here.

And click here to read facts about older Americans.

Housing

• What aging parents fear most. When parents become too frail to care for themselves, many adult children have to decide between moving their elders into a home not equipped to handle them or submitting mom and dad to nursing care. Increasingly, though, adult kids are instead settling their parents in their back yards — not in tents, but in well-equipped cottages known as “granny pods.” Read more on this trend.
• You want to age in place and now Medicare wants to help you stay put. The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has announced several Affordable Care Act initiatives aimed at keeping more chronically ill patients at home for care. The new efforts, which are scheduled to roll out over three years, kick off June 1. Click for details.
• Concerned about nursing homes? You may have good reason. At least 34 people died in a single New Orleans nursing home when Hurricane Katrina hit and the facility’s owners had no disaster plan in place. Seven years later, at least 95 percent of nursing homes inspected by the U.S. government still had serious gaps in how they said they’d handle tornadoes, hurricanes, floods or other catastrophes. And there’s no timetable in place for making things better. Click to read more.
• Institutional care — CAUTION!!! More worrying news for nursing home residents: As your checks contribute to record profits for nursing home owners, most of these care facilities are cutting back on what you get for your buck, by reducing staff or cutting workers’ wages and benefits. Read more here.

Health

• PSA tests could do more damage than good. Men older than 75 should not get routine PSA prostate cancer tests, according to medical recommendations, but older men are largely ignoring this advice. This is a problem, because as they age men are increasingly likely to receive false positive PSA tests. By the time they are 75, they are more likely to be hurt by the test or the treatment it spurs than they are to be harmed by prostate cancer. Unnecessary tests increase the risk of pain, incontinence and impotence.  Read more in the New York Times.
• MEDICARE ALERT. If Congress does not act, Medicare will run out of money within about 12 years, according to an updated look at the U.S. healthcare program for the elderly. Experts who reviewed the report say even that estimate is overly optimistic. Click to read more. The question is, what can you do about it? I think there is a lot you can do to protect yourself. Listen to Aging Options Radio or attend a seminar to find out more. Click here to register for a seminar and to access AgingOptions.
• A donut may not prove as sweet as you’d expect. Medicare’s infamous “Donut hole” — the gap in medication coverage that requires patients to pay 100 percent of costs above a certain benefit level — leads people to skip taking necessary pills, according to a new report out of Harvard Medical School. Read more here.
• Medicare advances: Does your doc know? Medicare’s sickest patients can now receive transcatheter aortic valve replacement if they have heart valve damage. The treatment is a new technology that is less invasive than previous options. Read more from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.
• Alzheimer’s news. New research adds to scientific efforts to reveal beta-amyloid protein plaques, the brain-clogging fragments that have been associated with Alzheimer’s disease. Read more about this promising research.

Finance

• Retirement issues – are you counting on Social Security to allow you to retire? American workers are either more confident in the future of Social Security than they were five years ago, or less confident in their personal retirement funds. In 2007, just 27 percent said they expected Social Security to be a major source of income in retirement. A recent poll found that now 33 percent do. Read more here.
• At what age do you retire? As the age at which people can receive full Social Security benefits has climbed, so has the age at which Americans expect to retire, according to a new Gallup poll. Today, the average working American expects to retire at 67. In the mid-1990s, the average expected age of retirement was 60. Click for more from Gallup.
  

Legal

• About time and good riddance. More than 100 people have been arrested across seven cities in a massive Medicare Fraud Strike Force operation that resulted in charges related to $452 million in false billing. Read more from the Department of Health and Human Services.
• Not a Safe Harbor Trust, even though the client was led to believe it was. A Massachusetts woman who transferred $17,400 to a trust to benefit her children will have to wait before she can received Medicaid benefits — even though a court approved her estate plan. Read more about this case. If you’re using Medicaid to pay for nursing care, watch out for the income and asset rules that govern this need-based program.