On November 14, 2019 Ted Knutson writes on Forbes:
Baby Boomers are facing large-scale homelessness, Congress was warned today.
“Without serious attention and planning, we will have elderly paupers on our streets and in our parks in large numbers,” Dr. Joanne Lynn, policy analyst for the Program to Improve Elder Care at the Medicare and Medicaid consulting firm Altarum asserted.
Her warning came in a House Ways and Means Committee hearing on the coming financial tsunami facing Boomers as they surge into their late 60s and beyond.
On Medicaid, which is often used by seniors to pay for long-term care when they run out of money, Lynn and Elder Justice Coalition National Coordinator Robert Blancato warned high demand by Baby Boomers could lead to restrictions on entrants and services in the program by the 2030s.
Ways and Means chair Massachusetts Democrat Richard Neal attacked long-term care in America as insufficient, confusing, emotionally taxing and unaffordable.
He asserted round-the-clock, in-home care costs $180,000 per year with over $80,000 a year to live in a nursing home and assisted living $43,000 yearly.
Long-term care could become out of reach for Boomers who had led financially secure lives when they were working as their savings are drained to pay for immediate health care needs, Blancato cautioned.
“(Boomers) will be unable to afford essential supports and will have to confront homelessness, food insecurity, inability to manage personal hygiene,” Lynn, a gerontologist asserted.
To make more housing available for aging Boomers when the crisis hits in the coming ten years, Dr. Lynn said housing codes could start requiring basic disability adaptation in all units, low-income housing vouchers could be more readily available, and elderly persons living in tents and cars could have some priority in obtaining housing before exposure makes them so sick as to require nursing home care.
“Now is the time to enact legislation to build greater capacity in housing that works for people across their life span through state grants. Housing stock that would be safe, affordable and accessible would prevent people from having to live in a nursing home when disability sets in (often paid by Medicaid) for lack of available housing.” Lynn told the House committee.
Other solutions she has advocated for the long-term-care financial crisis include: incentivizing personal saving for retirement, long-term care services and support insurance, and long-term care; investing in the work-readiness of young people so that the economy is strong and can yield more tax revenue; and standardizing and improving the quality of geriatric medical care.
She also advocated enabling communities to drive down the per capita cost of disability in old age and improve reliability and appropriateness of services through local innovation and collaboration.
Aging Boomers face the gloom of a shortage in hospice care, National Hospice and Palliative Care Organization President & CEO Edo Banach said during the session.
“The number of hospice and palliative care physicians and members of the interdisciplinary team will drop dramatically over the next two decades,” Banach warned.
Alzheimer’s Impact Movement executive director Robert Egge noted a study of Medicaid beneficiaries with Alzheimer’s found black/African Americans had significantly higher costs of care than whites or Hispanics primarily due to more inpatient care and medical problems in tandem with dementia.
Older black/African Americans are twice as likely to have Alzheimer’s and other dementia as whites, one and a half times that of Hispanics, he said.
Right now, the lives of many nursing home and assisted living facility residents are bleak, the Long Term Care Community Coalition executive director Richard Mollot told the House panel.
“Avoidable pain, degrading conditions and substandard care are a part of hundreds of thousands of nursing home residents’ lives every day,” Mollot said.
Mollot attacked nursing home oversight as harmfully weak, charging violation fines are “relatively a minor expense.”
He noted inspectors uncovered repeated violations of the same requirement three or more times over three years in more than 40% of nursing homes.
“But less than half of all nursing homes have received any federal fine whatsoever in the last three years and, of those, the average amount is approximately $1,600,” Mallot said.
He added while more than 50% of residents in assisted living and nursing homes have some form of dementia or cognitive impairment and 67% of dementia-related deaths occur in nursing homes, many facilities fail to equip their staff with the knowledge and skills necessary to provide comfort and care.
The consumer advocate pointed to Illinois state inspectors claiming housekeeping and maintenance services at Alden Town Manor in the Chicago suburbs of Cicero had minimal harm despite finding maggot infestation on a resident’s genital area at the Alden Town Manor.
In a June report, the Government Accountability Office said it is imperative that the government agency responsible for ensuring nursing homes protect residents from abuse beef up its oversight.
The report said the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services falls short of that responsibility because information on abuse and perpetrator types is not readily available and incidents of abuse reported by nursing homes lack key information.
GAO said state agencies that conduct nursing home inspections should immediately report reasonable suspicions of crimes against residents to law enforcement.
However, the authors of the study complained those reports often can take weeks or months currently because CMS requires state agencies to tell police or other authorities about abuses only after they are substantiated.
“Two (state) Medicaid Fraud Control Units d we interviewed told us the delay in receiving referrals limits their ability to collect evidence and prosecute cases—for example, bedding associated with potential sexual abuse may have been washed, and a victim’s wounds may have healed,” the GAO report said.
Close to 1.4 million elderly or disabled individuals reside in more than 15,500 nursing homes nationwide.
Gary Reber Comments:
The homelessness and poverty situation will dramatically get worse as the vast majority of the American population do not earn enough as employed workers in jobs, their ONLY source of income. They are forced to spend their earnings on the necessities of life and live week to week and month to month, while also struggling to pay every month rent and the interest on their credit cards.
We are in a crisis and our so-called leaders, economists and academia just don’t comprehend what is transpiring in the productive world where the corporations active in the economy are using threats of further automation to keep labor costs as low as possible or deciding to invest in sophisticated and efficient “machine” automation to replace workers altogether in order to maximize profits for their owners and produce consistent and reliable quality products and services.
Of course, the questions should be who owns the non-human “things” (in economics, capital assets) and who should own the “things” of the future that more efficiently produce or eliminate the necessity for mass human labor and degrade the worth of labor as there are more workers than jobs in which one can earn a livable wage?
While the national focus is always on job creation instead of ownership creation, our scientists, engineers, and executive managers who are not owners themselves, except for those in the highest employed positions, are encouraged to work to destroy employment by making the capital “worker” owner more productive. How much employment can be destroyed by substituting machines for people is a measure of their success –– always focused on producing at the lowest cost. Only the people who already own productive capital are the beneficiaries of their work –– the wealthy capital asset ownership class –– as they systematically concentrate more and more capital ownership in their stationary 1 percent ranks. Yet the 1 percent is not the people who do the overwhelming consuming. The result is the consumer populous is not able to get the money to buy the goods, products, and services produced as a result of substituting “machines” for people. And yet you can’t have mass production without mass human consumption made possible by “customers with money.”
Abraham Lincoln said that the purpose of government is to do for people what they cannot do for themselves. Government also should serve to keep people from hurting themselves and to restrain man’s greed, which otherwise cannot be self-controlled. Anyone who seeks to own productive power that they cannot or won’t use for consumption are beggaring their neighbor — the equivalency of mass murder — the impact of concentrated capital ownership.
The purpose of production in a market economy is the consumption of goods, products, and services by the consumers who make up the economy. But without income, the non-capital ownership class, the 99 percent, cannot afford to purchase the products and services they desire. But when incomes rise among consumers who have the need and desire to improve their material standard of living, the market demand for goods, products and services strengthens, which in turn increases production and results in a growth economy that, as a byproduct, creates livable wage jobs, not the government-style make-work.
Ideally, with everything else being equal, supply and demand should always be in balance, with everyone producing as much as he or she consumes, and consuming as much as he or she produces. There is only one way to be able to consume, and that is to produce. (The other ways enable someone to consume without producing.)
Sadly, academia, the wealthy capital ownership class, and politicians have failed to educate the American people through our schools, even at university levels, and the national media dialogue to teach effective financial means to acquire productive capital with the earnings of capital, simultaneously with economic growth.
Unfortunately, the vast American majority only understand earning an income via employment and are unable to make reductions in consumption to accumulate savings for their retirement and speculate via purchasing existing stocks (legalized gambling), hoping for a financial gain when they sell the stock.
Significantly, they are excluded from purchasing new stock issues, representing new capital asset formation, with the earnings generated by the investment, without the requirement of past savings.
To prevent a future of greedy rich people manipulating the lives of people who struggle with declining labor worker earnings and job opportunities, and then accumulate the bulk of the money through monopolized productive capital ownership resulting in not only elderly paupers but the young able bodied as well living homeless on our streets and in our parks in large numbers, we must embrace policies and system reforms necessary to create inclusive prosperity by universally broadening the ability to generate income through personal ownership of productive capital and the inclusive opportunity to become a capital owner. We must reform the system and empower EVERY child, woman and man to acquire productive capital with the earnings of capital using insured, “pure” interest-free capital credit, without the requirement of past savings.
The following are resources to learn more about how to solve the growing problem of economic inequality and create a future environmentally responsible growth economy that can support general affluence for EVERY citizen.
Follow the Center for Economic and Social Justice at www.cesj.org and http://capitalhomestead.org/. Also see The Kelso Institute at http://www.kelsoinstitute.org/. Like the Just Third Way Group at http://www.facebook.com/groups/Justthirdway/.
Support the Agenda of The JUST Third WAY Movement (also known as “Economic Personalism”) at http://foreconomicjustice.org/?p=5797, http://www.cesj.org/resources/articles-index/the-just-third-way-basic-principles-of-economic-and-social-justice-by-norman-g-kurland/ and http://www.cesj.org/resources/articles-index/the-just-third-way-a-new-vision-for-providing-hope-justice-and-economic-empowerment/.
Support Monetary Justice at http://capitalhomestead.org/page/monetary-justice.
Support the enactment of the proposed Capital Homestead Act (aka Economic Democracy Act and Economic Empowerment Act) at http://www.cesj.org/learn/capital-homesteading/, http://www.cesj.org/learn/capital-homesteading/capital-homestead-act-a-plan-for-getting-ownership-income-and-power-to-every-citizen/, http://www.cesj.org/learn/capital-homesteading/capital-homestead-act-summary/ and http://www.cesj.org/learn/capital-homesteading/ch-vehicles/. And The Capital Homestead Act brochure, pdf print version at http://www.cesj.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/C-CHAflyer_1018101.pdf and Capital Homestead Accounts (CHAs) at http://www.cesj.org/learn/capital-homesteading/ch-vehicles/capital-homestead-accounts-chas/
