On the Aging Beat
June 27, 2026
A weekly update of articles, opinion pieces, and other items. All links are free.
By Kimberly Bonvissuto for McKnight’s Senior Living.
Older and disabled Americans will pay a steep price for the Supreme Court’s latest ruling stripping the protected status of 350,000 Haitian immigrants. This was the assessment of leaders of prominent senior care organizations interviewed by Bonvissuto.
“Staff and caregivers who support older adults every day — legal employees who in some of our communities represent 8% or more of the entire workforce — can now lose their jobs overnight,” LeadingAge President and CEO Katie Smith Sloan said in a statement. “There is no workforce waiting in the wings capable of replacing the long-standing relationships, in some cases built over years and even decades, that are so vital to quality care.”
Don’t Blame Old People For American Decline
By Alexander Zaitchik for The New Republic.
This is a take-down of Yale Professor Samuel Moyn’s Gerontocracy in America, in which he urges Boomers to stop hogging all the jobs and money, leave important positions, and take their declining mental faculties with them. “Its depiction of the great aging as an orgy of elder egotism is so dark that it casts a shadow on the very medical advances that enabled it,” Zaitchik writes.
US health spending projected to hit $9T by 2034
By Bridget Early for Modern Healthcare.
Health spending continues to run amok. Pick your exploitive healthcare villains of choice, as they’re all lined up to feed at the healthcare trough. But the biggest driver of rising costs may be the rising senior population. “Medicare enrollment will increase 17.3% to 78.1 million,” Early reports.
Americans Are in Denial About Elder Care
By Stephanie H. Murray for The Atlantic.
“It is no secret that in the United States, the accessibility and quality of long-term care leave a lot to be desired,” Murray writes. “But many Americans go through life carrying two big misconceptions about aging. One is that, in the postindustrial world, a ton of elder care is hired out to professionals. The other is that, with sufficient savings and adequate public services, it is possible to avoid relying on kin for help.”
“These notions are, quite simply, more myth than reality.”
DOJ announces $6.5B healthcare fraud takedown with record Medicaid enforcement
By Dave Muoio for Fierce Healthcare.
“The Department of Justice unveiled charges against 455 people, including 90 doctors and other licensed medical professionals, for their alleged participation in healthcare schemes that involved more than $6.5 billion in false claims and other patient harm,” Muoio’s article says. Many of the charges were related to phony skin grafts.
“Highlighted among the enforcement actions were charges against 11 defendants in connection with fraudulent amniotic wound allografts. One company was allegedly responsible for more than $4 billion of Medicare billings and $2 billion of payments for amniotic wound allografts. Another charged defendant, a nurse practitioner, allegedly was involved in a $906 million scheme that billed Medicare more than $1 million per patient on average for unneeded allografts, while three others were charged in a similar $118 million fraud scheme.”
Read the U.S. Department of Justice charges here.
Having a regular bedtime is key to good sleep. Here’s how to set one.
By Anahad O’Connor and Maggie Penman for The Washington Post.
Here’s a sobering reason to sleep better:
“Scientists instructed more than 72,000 middle-aged and older adults to wear sensors that tracked their nightly sleep for a week,” the authors write. “Then they followed them for up to eight years. They found that people who had the most irregular sleep schedules were 26 percent more likely to experience heart attacks, strokes and other major cardiovascular events compared with people who went to bed and woke up at fairly consistent times each day.”
Their tips include:
Most people generally need between seven and nine hours of sleep each night. If you must be up at 6 a.m., and you know you need about eight hours of sleep, then ideally you should go to bed around 10 p.m.
Add a “winding-down” routine before your bedtime. This could mean reading a book, writing in a journal, doing some gentle stretching, meditation or anything else that you find calming.
In addition to having a bedtime routine, try to create other nightly routines as well. Think about having your dinner at roughly the same time each night. If that’s not possible, then try to schedule an after-dinner walk or some other activity at the same time each night.
DUELING THOUGHTS ON SOCIAL SECUIRTY
A Counterfactual Social Security History
By The Editorial Board of The Wall Street Journal.
“What if Congress had passed President Bush’s proposal to let workers invest $1,000 from their payroll taxes in private investment accounts?” the editorial asks. “In 2011 workers could have begun benefiting from the growth in diversified stock and bond funds. If a worker had invested $83 per month in an S&P 500 index fund and reinvested dividends, the account would have grown to some $55,000 by now.… If you were 22 years old in 2011, you’ll miss out on more than $800,000 that you could have accumulated under the Bush plan by the time you retire.”
Our Plan to Save Social Security
By Senators Bernie Moreno and Elizabeth Warren in The New York Times.
“Today, the maximum Social Security withholding for one worker is $22,878, or 12.4 percent of $184,500. Not a penny more, even if an individual’s salary far exceeds $184,500,” the Senators write. “According to one estimate, eliminating the payroll tax cap would inject around $3 trillion into the program over the next 10 years. Lifting the cap so that all income is treated the same would generate substantial revenue that would extend the solvency of Social Security for another generation.”
Stay safe, be kind, and don’t look away.
I am the principal author of Simon & Schuster’s Get What’s Yours series of books about Medicare, Social Security, and health care. Linked In.
My mom and stepdad were in assisted living on south Florida for a total of 9 years between them from 2010-2019 and all the aides and caregivers were Haitians. They were angels. My stepdad passed away 6 years before mo mom and her last 3 years were on home hospice in AL. I have stayed in touch with a few of them ever since then and am so sad and angry about this, They were caring, honest, loyal, reliable and cared for each other and all their patients. While management changed hands many times, the aides, kitchen staff, cooks, maintenance staff, etc stayed constant. I never asked nor did I care about their status and this will decimate care in many facilities and privately particularly in that part of the country, I have no idea how this void will be filled and it will be a void. I got to be closed with a few of the angels over the years and they all left horrific conditions in their country and through hard work and dedication made a good decent life for themselves and their families. A travesty.
Do old folks hog jobs, lowering quality? Are they responsible for how much health care costs our economy? I'm 76, solidly senior, and I say yes to a chunk of the accusation. (I could say "Boomer," but I hear the term used as a deindividualizing code word for old folks.)
I've known some people who didn't git when they should have got, including my former dentist, from what the specialists putitng my mouth back together tell me. We've seen this in industry as well, in government as well. Most of the time, though, I've seen old folks step down while they're still sharp and mentally competent. I'm mighty glad that I still can tap institutional knowledge, or just personal experience, held by people long familiar with the work I'm grappling with. I still tap people in their 80s and 90s; I in turn still am called on, regularly, by professionals my age or a generation younger. I'm worse off when colleagues, SMEs who are a decade younger than me, vacate their places for younger, less-useful colleagues. In short, the job-hogging, quality-lowering claim sometimes is valid, but as a generalization it strikes me as hogwash.
Not so clear is the claim about healthcare costs. I enjoy the benefits of social security and medicare. I paid into the system, and didn't call Medicare my primary insurance till I was well into my 70s. Am I getting no more than my due? That's an awfully hard call. Yes, any insurance system is a gamble, predicated on the notion that if I am wonderfully healthy, my years of paying premiums subsidize the treatment of those who drew bad cards--and vicer versa. But who'd'a foreseen the kind of costs that go into keeping me alive, if not kicking (until a good while after a possible knee replacement)? Paying for healthcare does kinda look like a pyramid scheme.
I don't pretend to have a good answer. One obvious answer is to kill off the old and frail, unless they're wealthy and have good advocacy. We saw this solution during early COVID, with the horrible mortality rates in eldercare facilities, or granny warehouses, or whatever we want to call them. We may see something similar now, as immigrants who served as caretakers are deported, leaving care that doesn't deserve the name, with similar, predictable results--only at the micro-level, one disabled person developing bed sores, and declining, at a time; another dying at home, with no one checking in for just too long.
People like me, with medicare, medigap, family, literacy, and an engaged community, we may do okay. Of course, to falsify part of the economic logic that supports getting rid of the helpless and not-now-productive, I doubt the medical costs of the rural, or poor, or uneducated, or inarticulate approach those of a geezer like me. So I'm (sort of) all right, Jack. But if my country goes down this route, it shows how badly Putin's asset has been stinking it up.