A ‘Tsunami’ Is In The Forecast For America’s Aging Population
This rapidly expanding population of aging Americans will put new demands on areas of medicine such as geriatrics and long-term care, yet the numbers of practitioners in these fields are dropping almost as fast as the numbers of their potential patients rise.
Herbert Sier, associate chief of geriatric medicine at Northwestern Memorial Hospital, said that the Alliance for Aging Research projects that 14,000 more geriatricians are needed to address the needs of the current aging population. Yet numbers in the field, which currently counts 7,600 practitioners, are falling, down 22 percent in the last 10 years. Meanwhile, the culture of geriatric care may be contributing to the shortage of nurses and doctors entering the field. Low pay and practice settings that appear unattractive may be driving away students.
And that doesn’t begin to consider the impact of the rationing predicted as a result of Obamacare.
Photo Credit: iStockPhoto/deanm1974
Labels: elderly, health care
Saturday, July 04, 2009
Remember, It’s Independence Day!
I want to wish all of my readers a very blessed Independence Day and use this opportunity to write a post I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. I hope you’ll bear with me as I rant. And forgive the length of this post. You’ll see that I feel rather strongly….jpg)
It seems that lately I’ve been just plain mad. All the time. Everywhere I turn, I see our country and our way of life being upended. While I’m not a fan of the present administration, this isn’t necessarily partisan. Rumblings started even while President Bush was in office. Some of that, I’m convinced, was anticipation of doom once the two presidential candidates were determined. Some of it was linked to Congressional incumbents who seem to have lifetime appointments no matter what they do. Nonetheless, we’ve been hit, and hit hard. I’m sure many of you have been as well.
My husband and I have worked hard all our lives. Before marriage, after marriage. We’ve lived most of our 30 years of married life on one income, and that not a big one. My husband was a mid-level government employee and never made much. But we were committed to my staying home and raising our son, so we made do. We live in an older three-bedroom, one bath home that we paid off as soon as we could. Sure, we could have taken our equity, which until last year was quite substantial, and moved to a bigger home. But that would have required a mortgage we weren’t sure we could afford, so we stayed put and made do with what we had. Now we’re being asked to bail out people who didn’t make the responsible decision. People who took on mortgages they couldn’t afford and shouldn’t have been given. Why?
We’ve always driven our cars until they died, saving for the next one and paying cash. Right now our cars are a 1996 and 1998, both with over 100,000 miles on them. Yet every day I hear ads from auto companies promising to make your car payment if you get laid off. What happened to good old-fashioned personal responsibility?
We use our credit cards to rack up miles and dollars. But we pay them off monthly and never spend more than we know we can afford. Yet every day I hear ads for credit counseling and consolidation saying, “Credit card debt? It’s not your fault?” Well, if it isn’t your fault, whose is it? We didn’t use their credit card and run up thousands of dollars debt. And frankly, we don’t want to pay for it. Yet Congress is now passing legislation to make credit easier for those who don’t pay and harder for me. (I understand that some people use credit during a layoff, but most I know continue spending at a level that makes hubby and I shake our heads. Hard times call for drastic measures. I know. We’ve been there several times over the years.)
Meanwhile, the President and Congress are pushing bill after bill to increase debt, bail out deadbeats, bail out businesses that should be allowed to fail, and build bridges to nowhere. They’re voting on bills to increase our energy costs based on junk science and bills to confiscate the decent health care coverage most of us have in order to cover a few more people who have made other choices or are in our country illegally.
This administration has increased the national debt exponentially. If President Obama's budget is implemented, CBO projects the national debt to reach an unprecedented and unsustainable 82.4 percent of Gross Domestic Product by 2019.
To add injury to insult, lawmakers don’t even pretend to read the bills or hold appropriate hearings anymore. Everything is an emergency that must be voted on without delay. Lawmakers seem to be controlled by some higher power, changing their vote on a dime. My dime, BTW.
We now have 31—count’em 31—czars running every aspect of government. These Czars are 1) not accountable to Congress, 2) paid what ever Obama decides to pay them, at our expense, 3) can claim executive privilege if called to testify before Congress, 4) set policy for the cabinet secretaries, and 5) are so radical they would never have received Senate approval. What happened to our representative republic?
So what does this have to do with being a GenSandwicher? Here’s the deal. We worked hard all our lives. Lived within our means. Paid our bills. Now because of monumental failed policies and failed consumer confidence, with a little corruption thrown in here and there, we’ve lost about half of our net worth. That’s the net worth we were counting on for retirement. After being responsible all our lives, we expected to be able to retire comfortably, travel, and perhaps even leave a little nest egg to our son. At a minimum, not be a burden on him. Now we wonder if we’ll have enough to live out our lives or if we’ll be working at WalMart when we’re 80. No one is bailing us out because we’re responsible. Our taxes and expenses are increasing, lowering our standard of living. We didn’t even benefit from the most recent stimulus package because we aren’t working and aren’t collecting Social Security. And now we’re being warned of inflation on the level of the Jimmy Carter years.
To add injury to insult, in the process of confiscating the wealth of our generation and the next, this administration and the Congress are rushing headlong into Socialism, nationalizing private industries at will. In previous downturns, we’ve been able to assume that what goes down will go back up and even invest while stocks are on sale. But this time, it seems that the rules have changed and continue to change, creating an atmosphere of uncertainty. When bondholders holders at GM can arbitrarily be subordinated to the unions which caused the problem in the first place, how can anyone invest in confidence? When profitable auto dealers who contributed to Republican politicians are summarily closed by the Car Czar while failing dealerships that contributed to Democrats remain open, how can small business owners make confident decisions? We are turning into a third world country and no longer know what rules are, so we sit in fear, knowing that even under the best circumstances, we wouldn’t live long enough to recover what we’ve lost. And these aren’t the best circumstances…
Folks, I’m concerned for our nation. Our freedoms. Our independence. And I’m concerned for our personal lives. The nation the founders created, our forefathers fought for, and we’ve worked for is being dismantled. I love this country. I love the life and the freedom and the prosperity we enjoy. I came up out of abject poverty because of the opportunities I had in this nation. I pray that Americans will wake up and do whatever it takes to defend our liberties and our way of life. Before it’s too late. Remember, it’s INDEPENDENCE DAY. What do you think?
Labels: government, health care, sandwich generation, tax increases
Saturday, February 28, 2009
Do We Really Want Government Controlled Health Care?
Linda Yezak made an interesting comment on my February 10 post and mentioned an article she had written called “Ocean Front Property in Arizona.” I checked it out and want to commend it to you. She gives real life examples of what happens when the government tries to practice medicine. As aging Baby Boomers and Gen Sandwichers, we need to wake up and pay attention. Medical care for our parents and ourselves is at risk, and with it, our very lives.For years I’ve worked with women on disability. Their medical care—such as it is--was provided primarily by Medicaid. They often can’t find a physician who will treat them, and when they do, the medical care is much like Linda describes—cost-cutting decisions that result in additional problems. I’ve especially seen issues related to psychotropic drugs being mismanaged. It’s terribly frustrating and dangerous. Why do we think that when the government is the primary care payer for all, quality of care will be any better than it is for the few now? These cost-cutting measures put every one of us at risk. It’s so easy to want a free lunch, but folks, in the end, we’ll regret it.
Labels: government, health care, Medicaid, medical care
Thursday, February 19, 2009
Will You Trust Google with Your Health Info?
Forbes.com announces that thanks to a partnership with IBM, Google has just released Google Health, a site where users can store and track information about their medical history, to connect to and stream data from medical devices. The service is now on the “More” page of the Google site.The computing giants clearly want to get a head start in the movement approved in the Generational Theft bill to put everyone’s medical records into a giant database by 2014. They believe that by make the service new, trendy, and ever so useful, consumers will come to accept, yea, even demand, this service.
I don’t know about you, but I do not want my medical information floating around out there in cyberspace. I know, some medical provider groups have computerized patient data, and it is a boon. My mom’s HMO has electronic record, and there is a benefit to it. Her primary can see what the specialist have done and vice versa. The doctor can electronically order her labs, x-rays, and even prescriptions, saving her a wait at the pharmacy. But, the system is limited to that HMO and she could opt out of it by changing health plans. That’s a far cry from having the government having access to the intimate details of my medical care. Especially when another part of the Gen Theft bill calls for rationing care to those of us over 50.
Thanks, but no thanks.
Labels: elderly, health care, medical records
Tuesday, February 10, 2009
Stimulus Bill Endangers the Health of the Elderly and the Rest of Us
Buried about midway into the Stimulus package is language that will affect every Gen Sandwicher and every elderly person.Section 3001 establishes the office of The National Coordinator For Health Information Technology and requires the establishment of “an electronic health record for each person in the United States by 2014.” The electronic systems will be required to “ensure the comprehensive collection of patient demographic data, including, at a minimum, race, ethnicity, primary language, and gender information.” The law would require all health care providers, health plans, or health insurance issuers to implement these systems.
I don’t know about you, but I certainly don’t want my medical records in a federal database. Imagine the risks to privacy, regardless of the assurances in the bill. How often do we hear of breeches in electronic security as employees walk off with laptops? And imagine the cost to the medical system. Costs that will not provide patient care, but rather, “information systems” that will then be aggregated for government purposes.
Even more frightening, according to Betsy McCaughey on Bloomberg.com, are provisions that require the National Coordinator of Health Information Technology, to “monitor treatments to make sure your doctor is doing what the federal government deems appropriate and cost effective. The goal is to reduce costs and ‘guide’ your doctor’s decisions. These provisions in the stimulus bill are virtually identical to what Tom Daschle prescribed in his 2008 book, “Critical: What We Can Do About the Health-Care Crisis.” According to Daschle, doctors have to give up autonomy and “learn to operate less like solo practitioners.” Daschle says health-care reform “will not be pain free.” He says that seniors must be more accepting of the conditions that come with age rather than expecting treatment.
According to McCaughey, Medicare now pays for treatments deemed safe and effective. The stimulus bill would change that and apply a cost- effectiveness standard set by the Federal Council in a plan modeled after a U.K. board discussed in Daschle’s book. This board approves or rejects treatments using a formula that divides the cost of the treatment by the number of years the patient is likely to benefit. Treatments for younger patients are more often approved than treatments for diseases that affect the elderly, such as osteoporosis. In 2006, a U.K. health board determined that elderly patients with macular degeneration had to wait until they went blind in one eye before they could get a costly new drug to save the other eye. It took almost three years of public protests before the board reversed its decision
In essence, this bill opens the back door to a National Health program. It’s dangerous to Boomers and more dangerous to our parents. There are still three Republicans (Spector, Collins, and Snowe) who are voting for the bill, as well as all Democrats. If you care about your health care, you might want to weigh in.
Labels: Baby Boomers, elderly, health care, sandwich generation, stimulus
Monday, April 28, 2008
California and US Not Prepared for Aging Population
According to a new report from the Institute for Medicine, "Retooling for an Aging America: Building the Health Care Workforce," neither California nor the nation are ready to deal with the social and health care needs of the aging population. Some key findings in the report include:The percentage of Californians over 65 is expected to jump from 10 percent of the state population in 2000 to 17.5 percent in 2030. The baby boom generation begins to turn 65 in 2011.
There is a shortage in specialists in geriatrics, not just among physicians but also social workers, rehab therapists, speech therapists and nurses. Altogether, there are 7,100 geriatricians (physicians) in the United States - one per every 2,500 older Americans - and less than 1 percent of registered nurses are certified in geriatrics.
Turnover among nurse aides, who often care for the elderly, averages 71 percent annually, and up to 90 percent of home health aides leave their low wage jobs within the first two years. The national average is $8.50 (per hour) for personal or home-care aides.
Labels: aging, health care
Tuesday, December 04, 2007
Health Care Advocates for Mom and Dad
The Milwaukee Business Journal writes than an increasing number of adult children are becoming advocates for their aging parents’ health care needs. This is having an impact on employers as these advocates are present at work, but preoccupied.I’ve found that I need to be increasingly involved with Mom’s health care needs. She doesn’t hear well, nor does she understand much about the complexities of her medical needs. She nods like she understands, but if I challenge her, she really doesn’t know what the doctor said or what it means. To top it off, she’s what we used to call the “worried well”—people with minor health issues who are convinced they have cancer, heart problems, or something equally serious.
I’ve taken to having her make as many appointments as possible in a two-day period when I can plan to be there. It tires her, but we sure get a lot done. Recently we saw the podiatrist, the hearing aid specialist, and the neurologist. In each case, the problem was less serious than she had been telling me it was, based on her understanding of what they had told her last time. We got a lot done in a little time and I was so glad I was able to go. And this time, we even had time to take her for a drive!
Labels: advocate, aging parents, health care, medical care