Vital Aging Network: Communities for a Lifetime Forum, June 9
Ecumen’s Lisa Fowler and our partners at the Minneapolis "virtual village" Mill City Commons will be among the panelists at the June 9th Vital Aging Network forum. The event will be held
June 9, 2009
10:30 AM to 12:30 PM
Rondo Community Outreach Library
461 N. Dale St.
St. Paul, MN 55103
More information is here. Also featured will be River Bluffs Village, which like Mill City Commons is a "virtual village" model the Mendota Heights area of the Twin Cities. Mike Weber, CEO of Volunteers of America/Minnesota, will discuss Communities for a Lifetime legislation that passed in Minnesota this legislative session. And Bob Roepke, former mayor of Chaska, Minn., will discuss vision and leadership needed to create communities for a lifetime.
U.S. Senate Call-In Day: June 4 - Make Long-Term Care and Services Part of Health Care Reform
It’s time for us to call our U.S. Senators again on Thursday, June 4th. It takes just a few minutes … We anticipate that in the next week or so we will start seeing actual legislative proposals for health care reform.
Beginning at 8 a.m. Central on Thursday, June 4th, please call toll-free to (866) 281-7219. The system will ask you to say your state name and then transfer you to one of your Senators. When you get through, tell your Senator that inclusion of long-term services and supports in health reform is a must for both you and the people you serve.
[Please note that these designated phone lines are open only on June 4 from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Central time. As calls made outside of those hours will not be connected to an office, we ask that you please do not call other than during the designated hours.]
A sample phone script follows, but there is more information on our national association’s website if you need it. Simply go to: www.aahsa.org/callcongress.aspx.
Sample Phone Script
"Hello. I’m calling to ask the senator to help make sure long-term services and supports are part of health care reform. Including long-term services and supports in health care reform will achieve greater efficiency, promote personal responsibility and sustain our safety net programs like Medicaid. We must help individuals and families and we must help state governments, all of whom are struggling with increasing needs and costs. I thank the senator in advance for demonstrating leadership on this issue. We must make it affordable to care. Thank you."
After you have made your calls, or if you can’t get through, follow up with an email to your Senators.
Ecumen’s Meadows of Worthington Figures Out How Many People Can Fit in a Stretch Limousine
How many people can you fit in a stretch limo for a road trip?
We found you can fit 20. I recently organized a road trip from Worthington to Sioux Falls, S.D. for 19 residents of Ecumen’s Meadows of Worthington.
Our destination was a restaurant called "Michaels", which had once had been a Worthington-area hot spot that relocated to Sioux Falls. The owner, who is the original owner’s son, knew everyone and spent considerable time with each visitor. Hardy Rickbeil, leaning forward above, also knew everyone and worked the room. Hardy turns 101 in a few weeks. We had an absolute blast!
Last Titanic Survivor Dies - Sold Her Treasures to Pay for Long-Term Care
Last October we wrote about Millvina Dean, the last living survivor of the Titanic. She had to sell her Titanic treasures so she could afford long-term care. Ms. Dean died this weekend at 97. Below is video of an interview she gave last October.
Senator Kennedy to Introduce Long-Term Care Coverage as Part of Sweeping Health Care Reform
The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Sen. Ted Kennedy will soon introduce a health care bill that will include coverage for long-term care.
Sen. Edward Kennedy plans a new disability-insurance program that would automatically enroll all American workers as part of the sweeping health-care bill he is preparing to introduce, aides said Friday.
Premiums would automatically be charged, and in many cases deducted from workers' paychecks, unless they choose to opt out of the disability program. The idea is to give all workers a basic level of protection in case they become disabled. But it could draw complaints from people who see it as a de facto tax, given that few workers are expected to opt out.
On average, premiums could not exceed $65 per month, according to a Senate aide who described the provision in detail.
Participants would be entitled to a cash benefit of at least $50 a day if they become so disabled they cannot participate in at least two or three activities of daily living, such as eating, bathing or using the toilet. The money could be used for expenses to support staying in one’s home.
If all American workers participated, one estimate found that the program would collect $320 billion in its first year, the Senate aide said.
Kennedy’s father Joe you’ll recall suffered a stroke and was disabled for sometime with a broken body and a still sharp mind. His sister experienced a lobotomy and was institutionalized in Wisconsin. No doubt these life experiences have played a role in his passion for disability rights and his reported upcoming inclusion of long-term care financing reform as part of health care reform.
Fran Tarkenton Now Dedicated to Improving the Quality of Life of Seniors, So He Writes
You might have heard the former Vikings star quarterback express his opinion on Brett Favre this week, but did you know that Fran is now a senior blogger?
Fran, 69, says he’s loving being a senior. His post Senior Momentum is here. Tarkenton, also owns Tarkenton Financial, where he says he’s focused on one thing: Improving the quality of life of senior citizens.
An Idea: Here’s how Fran could combine financial planning and improving the life of seniors: he could join other Americans in lobbying Congress to include long-term care coverage as part of health care reform - that could dramatically improve seniors’ quality of life by helping them get the services they need where they most want to live.
Fran apparently has an autobiography coming out soon, what a great public service tie-in for his book tour.
Attention Fran and Changing Aging Readers: We have another congressional call-in day scheduled for June 4th. More details coming . . .
Spirituality of Aging and The Gift of Years By Joan Chittister
“We go on growing right to the edge of the grave. So grow …"
That’s the summary message of a new book called The Gift of Years by Sister Joan Chittister, popular author and Benedictine nun in Erie, Pennsylvania. Here are other nuggets on the spirituality of aging from The Gift of Years:
The Buddhists tell the story of a man fleeing from a tiger who went plunging over a cliff and saved himself only by catching hold of a small strawberry plant growing between the rocks of the precipice. Caught between the tiger above and the gorge below, the man clung to the bush with one hand -- thought for a moment -- and with the other hand picked the most luscious strawberry he had ever eaten in his entire life.
It is age that teaches us to enjoy life, to savor every moment of it, to spend our time on what counts, to be present where we are and see it for the first time.
Indeed age simply teaches the rest of us that we have nothing at all to fear from any stage in life. The aging of any of us gives the rest of us permission to keep on growing, keep on changing, and keep on living!
Or as Gelett Burgess puts it: "If in the last few years you haven’t discarded a major opinion or acquired a new one, check your pulse. You may be dead."
What we celebrate when we celebrate the passages of life is the valor of people who every day of their lives teach the rest of us clearly that we, too, can learn the three great lessons of life:
Happiness in little things;
Fearlessness in everything,
And the presence of strawberries everywhere.
In every situation, clearly, we too like Abraham and Methuselah, like Sarah and the Prophetess Anna, like Moses and the matriarchs, can learn to live life well, to taste life wholly and, most of all, to pass on the meaning of life to those who come stumbling after.
A tourist tramping the mountain villages of northern New England came upon a grizzled old woman sitting in silence on her cabin stoop. "Have you lived here all your life?" the visitor asked.
"Not yet," the old lady replied.
Is life over after retirement has come and golden jubilees have been passed and the gold watches are all passed out and the home has been sold and work is no longer the reason we get up in the mornings? Are the markers of life simply subtle but insidious signs that all the really important things of life are really over? Oh no, my friends, not yet, not yet, not yet.
And how can we be so sure? That’s simple: because the rest of us still have so much to learn from those who are going the way before us, who have tasted life and found it full of every flavor and come to appreciate them all -- because you and I still have so much life yet to live and because we still have so much to learn about happiness, about fearlessness, about tigers and strawberries.
There is no doubt about it: in a world where newness has become the neurosis of the age, we need the elderly now more than ever, so that as Jonathan Swift counsels -- we may learn to live all the days of our life.
It is just then, when all the baubles and bangles of life fall away that people begin to teach the really important lessons of in life: how to live without living for things; how to love without loving for personal gain. How to last beyond the million little deaths of life.
It is just then when younger people need the older generation most of all. It is just then that the older generation achieves its greatest stature and carries its greatest responsibilities to the rest of us. It is time for this world to discover a new respect for wisdom; to bring new attention to the spirituality of aging. It is time for the aging to realize their value and claim their responsibilities to the spiritual development of us all.
Indeed, the book of Proverbs teaches us well: "The beauty of the aged is their gray hair." Because scripture knows well that when a world loses its memory, it loses its way.
Media Needs to Get Hip to the Age Wave
Ecumen CEO Kathryn Roberts was doing an interview yesterday with the Associated Press on including long-term care financing reform as part of health care reform. And out popped another sign of America’s Age Wave: AP, the country’s premier wire service, has designated a reporter, Matt Sedensky, to cover the beat of "aging."
AP sees aging is changing America. But so many media avoid aging-related coverage because they don’t think the subject falls into a high-spending advertising demographic (meaning younger people) or they don’t have the people who engage in the subject or they think it’s boring. Hello … . more people than ever before in this country’s history are aging. And that means there’s fascinating stories of aging changing America from housing to technology to family relations to product development to finances to public policy … . and on and on.
Jim Klobuchar: The Confirmand
Below is a new post from Ecumen Guest Blogger Jim Klobuchar. Enjoy.
She was the last to speak in a church ceremony we still call confirmation. There were obligatory hymns, families spread gregariously from end to end in the pews, the up-tempo informalities of the church elders presenting the class, and then Pertinent Remarks by the graduates.
The assembled adults craned nervously for every word from the honored scholars, hoping to be enthralled but bravely prepared for something less.
This was the confirmands' graduation exercise, an ancient rite escorting eight young people into that marvelous and nebulous age that mixes whacky adolescence with an expanding awareness of both the possibilities and the solemnities of life.
It was a reasonable and appealing cross-section of America’s teen society. There was talk of faith and commitment. There were giggles and affirmation, and there were a few frank admissions of doubt about the direction of the spiritual search now supposed to begin in earnest.
My granddaughter concluded the speaking program. She wore a kind of semi-formal dress because this was, well, an occasion; and she needed occasionally to guide her descending hair away from her eyes. She spoke softly, and I regretted missing some of her words because of that.
She was droll and serious by turns, needling her mother’s travel schedule as her state’s only current senator, having fun with her family, telling of her discoveries of another world--and the pain and poverty of that world--on a trip to Guatamala with her schoolmates.
She was Abigail. I remembered the day of her birth, when she almost died of a breathing congestion on the first day. I remembered writing an inscription in a book in which I collected stories of little-known people who lived extraordinary lives, and called it "Heroes Among Us."
"This book is for Abigail," I wrote, "born in 1995 into a world where there is still room for heroes."
And now here she was, not quite an adult, seasoning some of her light-hearted bewilderment with the world with a brief remembrance of her own-of a grandpa who had changed the course of his life and called it "Pursued by Grace."
I didn’t realize she had read it.
Poll Finds Americans See Long-Term Care Services As a Priority for Health Care Reform
It’s coming … it has to … health care reform, that is. And no health care reform is complete without long-term care coverage.
Mark your calendars for another call-in to Congress on June 4th. Each time we’ve had more callers and we need to do it again.
Ecumen participated in on a conference call today with other senior services leaders from around the country and former Minnesota U.S. Rep. Vin Weber, who is lobbying on this effort … . there is more momentum building for reforming long-term care financing than at any time in recent history.
AAHSA-Mellman Group Poll
According to a poll of 1,000 U.S. adults released today by AAHSA and conducted by the Mellman Group, long-term care services are seen as a priority - not an option - for health care reform. Key findings include:
- 85% of Americans believe long-term services and supports should be included in national health care reform.
- More than half of Americans (51 percent) feel strongly that with so many Americans needing help caring for seniors and disabled Americans, no health care reform plan is complete unless it addresses long-term services and supports.
- A majority of adults believe that offerings like care for people with Alzheimer’s disease (61 percent), assisted living (57 percent), and assistance for an older or disabled person in taking their medications (64 percent) will be covered when health care reform is enacted.