A Quick Review of Eldercare Resource Locator The Eldercare locater link at the bottom of the Medicare Caregiver home page connects to a page where users can search for a broad range of eldercare resources or for connections and contact information for local community organizations. Users can search by zip code or city or for information on a … Continue reading
Posted by Marti Weston …
Redesigned Medicare Caregiver Site: A Graphical Tour
To discover Medicare and caregiving resources, check out the redesigned caregiving website, debuting Tuesday, April 12, 2011. It’s user-friendly and graphically interesting with a focus on easy information access. At the same time updated site promotes learning, sharing, supporting, and collaborating. Adult children, even if they are not providing a huge amount of caregiving support, would … Continue reading
Medicare Projections: Congressional Budget Office
Read CBO: Seniors Would Pay Much More For Medicare Under Ryan Plan in the Kaiser Health News. A graph using Congressional Budget Office (CBO) data depicts the costs to a Medicare beneficiary (what a person will pay) in 2022 and 2030. In the article Congressman Ryan says, “Washington has been making empty promises to Americans from a … Continue reading
The Good Caregiver: Rules of the Road for Adult Children
I have just read The Good Caregiver cover-to-cover. The recently published book, by Robert L. Kane, M.D., is an all-in-one user’s guide with thorough, indexed, and therefore easy-to-find information about every aspect of elderly parent caregiving. Though he is a world-renowned specialist on aging and long-term care (Read Dr. Kane’s faculty bio), and he produces lots of … Continue reading
SeniorTech: Nothing to Fear but Fear …
Many of us find ourselves helping senior parents with technology. These days it goes hand-in-hand with even the most moderate caregiving assistance. Read Seniors Have Nothing to Fear but Fear Itself, a post by Jamie Carracher over at the Aging Online blog. Carracher points out that most seniors want to learn as much as they … Continue reading
Pay Attention to Policy Discussions
Check out the many informational links to documents explaining proposed changes in Medicare and Medicaid at this Kaiser Health News article, Resources And Proposals On Curbing Medicare Cost Growth. If this is where we are going, people should educate themselves and understand what is going on. Stay on top of the issues. If Medicare will cost more … Continue reading
The Scams of Springtime (and Every Other Season)
I’ve been meaning to encourage people to read a post, Caregivers Need to be Alert to Scams that Target the Elderly, over at the Inside Aging Parent Care blog. It provides an excellent overview of scams that target people in general and seniors in particular. Scammers are sophisticated operators, figuring out where to find elderly, … Continue reading
Will Concierge Medical Practices Cause Medicare Decline?
Read High-end Medical Option Prompts Medicare Worries, an article posted by the Associated Press today (April 2, 2011). The article, by health reporter Ricardo Alonzo-Zaldivar, examines the increasing number of practices that are moving toward concierge medicine (also called retainer-based physician practices). Concerns abound about how this might affect the access to care by Medicare beneficiaries. Although … Continue reading
Why We Will Pay for the Digital NY Times
Posts on As Our Parent Age sometimes recommend or feature links to New York Times articles. For complicated topics, articles from the Times as well as other newspapers may provide background or additional information, adding texture to a post (as do other newspaper stories). It’s been many years since we’ve had a paper edition of the New York … Continue reading
Senior Parent Tech Support-Advice I Wish I’d Discovered Ages Ago
This New York Times article, Five Tips for Helping Parents With Technology, provides some helpful tips for people who are troubleshooting the computers of senior parents. Gadgetwise blog reporter Paul Boutin offers common sense suggestions that can simplify over-the-phone family tech support, and it’s my view that you should consider following these ideas almost to the … Continue reading
Just Die Already???
Check out today’s post, No Need for Death Threats! over at Changing Aging, Dr. Bill Thomas’ blog. He snapped this picture of this magazine cover at the airport in Philadelphia. I am beginning to believe that the next 30 years will be generationally tough, not only for our parents but also for us, the adult children … Continue reading
Caregiving and Mobile Technology: We Need to Learn More
Mobile technology is moving into our lives — whether it’s the phone we carry, the newspaper we read, the heart monitor we must wear for a few days, the smart pass we use at tollbooths, or the gadget that helps to monitor a senior parent with balance issues but who lives alone. Increasingly, mobile gadgets … Continue reading
Aging Arthritis Patients Should Keep Moving
I’ve observed quite a few people, seniors and not quite seniors, who are diagnosed with arthritis and then gradually slow down and stop moving. They stop climbing stairs and taking walks. According to a recent study this may be precisely the wrong thing to do. In 2000 the Department of Health and Human Services came … Continue reading
Teens Mentoring Seniors and Mobile Phones
Saw this article, Want to Know What Your Cell Phone Can Do? Ask a Teenager, published in a Patch.com Reston,Virginia edition. The article describes how middle and high school students, from schools in the Reston, Virginia area, volunteered to be cell phone tutors with seniors, showing the elders how to use mobile phone features such … Continue reading
Friends or Friends of Friends: What’s the Difference?
Many of our senior parents use Facebook, and they are having great fun. However it’s important to help them understand the importance of carefully accepting friends. Seniors need to understand that strangers should never be accepted as electronic friends, and understanding the difference between “friends” and “friends of friends” is critical. The potential for privacy … Continue reading
Does Parental Longevity Predict How Long We Live?
Those of us with parents who are living long and rich lives tend to assume that we have inherited their genes and therefore possess the capacity to live at least almost as long. However, a recently published study in the Journal of Internal Medicine, published by the Karolinska Institute (a Swedish NIH), questions that assumption. … Continue reading
Different People – Different Dementias
The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel published a March 14, 2011 article, The Many Faces of Dementia which describes different types of the brain diseases as well as the importance of accurately and carefully diagnosing the type of brain abnormality that is affecting each person. Collecting information for a diagnosis involves not only the physician and patient, … Continue reading
Senior Emergency Centers at Hospitals
If you have taken aging parents for a noisy, confusing, not to mention long, emergency visit, you will want to keep well-informed about hospitals that are developing facilities expressly tailored to seniors. Yesterday, March 14, 2011, The New York Times New Old Age Blog posted an article, Emergency Rooms Built With the Elderly in Mind. … Continue reading
Health Reform Law Quiz from Kaiser Family Foundation
Foes of the new health care law spend a good deal of time circulating misinformation. To check your knowledge of the health reform law take this quiz at the Kaiser Family Foundation website. After you take the quiz, share it with others, to see if they really have accurate information. And don’t forget to see … Continue reading
Aging and Decision-Making
No matter how old we are, making decisions and choices can be more difficult when we are presented with lots of options. As we age, we may take more time to make decisions compared to our children or grandchildren, and the situation can become a source of frustration for family members. Read Why It Takes So … Continue reading
As Our Parents Age So Do We 