The deficit crisis is an artifical triage situation created in a recession to diminish aid to those over 65 as well as others in need

In 1973, the federal government started to pay for abortions for very poor women under Medicaid. It took three years until the Hyde amendment put a stop to it.
In addition, abortion services are not […]

An op-ed in the Boston Globe (April 15th, 2010) urges Americans to care for the happiness of our older citizens as the writer says the Japanese are beginning to do. The article focuses on a Japanese businessman who provides temp jobs for 370 people over 60 who have been forcibly retired.
Multiplied across […]

The spontaneous eruption over the new mammography regulations, and the confused history of the debate, warn us about the general relationships between government-issued medical guidelines, insurance coverage limits, and doctors’ discretion. […]

Ellen Goodman is usually thoughtful but in “The $250 donation to elders” (Boston Globe, Oct. 23) she doesn’t understand Social Security. The average woman receives only $896 a month.
She would get an additional $22 a month if Congress actually passes Obama’s proposed bill, intended […]

The President’s plan to offer long-term health insurance is a flawed but important step forward to solving a huge social problem. This is not just a Boomers’ problem.
[…]

Now it isn’t just ads selling cosmetic surgery that tell you how young you start declining. Two writers in the prestigious New York Review of Books (October 23, 2008) tell us that “nature” is indifferent to people over fifty, especially women, on the grounds that they have stopped reproducing. Then Diane Johnson and Dr. […]

No social gerontologist or cultural critic would say that aging is a “collection of diseases”–as Prof. David Sinclair of Harvard shockingly does in the Sunday Boston Globe issue on the so-called Boomers (July 27, 2008).
First of all, because 20% of those over eighty–aka “the aging”–have no chronic illnesses.
But mainly because–whether they suffer from illnesses […]

On March 27th, PBS repeated “Living Old”– its mainly depressive portrait of people over 85, most of whom are sick, and some of whom are sick and tired of living. The moral–implied in some of the interviews–is that no one should want to live that long. But hey, I finally said to myself on second […]

Women who look at models in magazines for as little as one to three minutes feel badly about their own bodies, according to a study reported in Science Daily. The University of Missouri-Columbia study concludes that women would do better to decrease their exposure to mass media images of women. In a nutshell, stop looking. […]