The Death of Beatrice: Reflections on Old Age in America
Katz, Michael B.
ARTICLES The Death of Beatrice Reflections on Old Age in America MICHAEL B. KATZ I don’t know if my mother intended to die on Valentine’s Day. But she did. At nearly ninetysix and a...
...In 2004, the 36,000 assisted living facilities housed 910,000 seniors, and the 2,100 continuing care communities were home to 600,000 more, including my mother...
...Michael B. Katz is Walter H. Annenberg Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania...
...A June 7, 2009, New York Times article titled, “Downturn Puts a Chokehold on Those Caring for Family Members,” reported that the “economic crisis has spread its pain widely, but it has placed special stresses on the estimated 44 million Americans who provide care for an elderly or disabled relative or spouse, many of whom have already made themselves financially vulnerable trying to balance work and family...
...So why did my mother choose Valentine’s Day...
...Indeed, over the years my admiration and appreciation for its caregivers soared...
...Medicaid—the income-tested public medical program—paid the bill for most of the 1.5 million nursing home residents in 2004...
...Even with the election of a Democrat as president, nothing on the horizon promised to increase public or private benefits for the elderly...
...it did not extend benefits to surviving spouses...
...Basic Social Security benefits rose four times between 1968 and 1972...
...After the Second World War, federally backed, longterm, low-interest mortgages together with the G.I...
...Of more consequence, he had to give up his plans for medical school...
...My mother could serve as a case history...
...I don’t know the answer, but, not so far in the future, I will have to decide...
...In 1880, only 12 percent of Americans were more than fifty years old, a population share that had grown to 28 percent in 2000...
...By the end of the century, they enjoyed the lowest poverty rate...
...She would have loved the symbolism...
...The overwhelming majority of their residents were women, who still outlived men...
...They worried about outliving their money and about the strain they put on their families...
...It is important, however, not to exaggerate the economic well-being of the elderly...
...In the early decades of the twentieth century, medical writers described old age as a time of weakness, disability, and uselessness...
...For almost all of them life was physically painful...
...For the most part, my friends in their seventies are, in appearance and condition, nothing like my mother’s father...
...Without this expansion, my mother would have had almost no income...
...Concentrated in central cities, disproportionately black and Latino, they were the poorest elderly citizens...
...But he seemed very old to me, not just in the way one’s grandparents always seem old, but with his stoop, fatigue, and heart failure, he was, in fact, a very old man...
...The 1967 Age Discrimination Employment Act (ADEA) banned discrimination against workers aged forty-five to sixty-five...
...It was at HILR that she came into her own as a writer, publishing memoirs and short essays into her late eighties...
...In this era when a decent standard of living depends on income from both spouses, the necessity of looking after parents is often an intolerable strain...
...The failure to adequately compensate caregivers for the elderly—and children, too—shows, whatever we profess to the contrary, the limited value we, as a polity, place on those too young, old, or infirm for market work...
...With the great recession that began in 2008, the value of workers’ pensions invested in private securities plummeted at the same time as their principal asset, the value of their homes, shrank...
...With the civil rights movement as inspiration, older Americans pressed for federal legislation prohibiting discrimination by age...
...I spent hours trying to figure out which of fifty-four available prescription drug plans in Massachusetts would serve my mother best...
...But now there was no alternative...
...What, I wondered, happened to people who lacked assistance...
...At first, it looks like a nearly utopian setting for the elderly lucky enough to live there...
...Blacks, less often homeowners, trailed farther behind whites in wealth than in income...
...The 1939 Social Security amendments expanded coverage to survivors and shifted the fiscal base of the system from partial dependence on reserves to current contributions...
...uninspired programs that simply opened classes to “senior associates...
...The single men, often eating alone, exuding depression, seem the most unhappy...
...Even before the recession, inequality among the elderly had increased...
...But the trajectory of his life was not all that different from that of many others...
...With unemployment high, home equity falling, and wages stagnant, the situation should get even worse...
...Many who lived alone remained impoverished, isolated, and vulnerable—a situation underscored with grisly detail by their disproportionate deaths in the Chicago heat wave of the early 1990s...
...at other times they moved in with their older children...
...Almost unnoticed, during the 1990s the experience of older Americans began, again, to diversify...
...Two or three times, a hospice staff member thought she had persuaded her to go only to have her adamantly refuse at the last minute...
...But its onset, setting, support, duration, and cultural meaning all took on new features, codified, eventually, by “empty nest” and “senior citizen,” terms that became current in the last half of the century to catch up with actual experience...
...In the nursing home wing, the façade of cheerfulness maintained by the more independent residents vanished...
...Many women were widows unable to support themselves with wage work...
...Her move to an institution assuaged my worries...
...These transformations redefined the course of human lives...
...Most of their friends had died...
...The shift from family to professional care brought a meteoric growth of personal care occupations...
...In truth, the golden years always were more myth than reality...
...If they waited until age seventy to file for benefits, the size of their monthly checks would increase...
...The talk one hears is often about illness and debility...
...More than 70 percent of men and women in their early sixties lived by themselves or with a spouse...
...What showed me the emergence of the elderly almost as a nation within a nation was a trip to Florida in the mid-1990s when my parents briefly flirted with the idea of moving to a retirement community there...
...When my mother’s father became too ill to work, he came to live in our house, where he died on the week of my high school graduation, thrilled to have lived long enough to know that I was headed for Harvard in the fall...
...The most obvious change in old age, of course, was its duration...
...Most remained poor, dependent for support on their children...
...Whenever possible, most of the elderly lived with their children...
...None of this was my mother’s fault or something she wanted...
...As in everything else, race inscribed inequality in American demography...
...Early in the twentieth century, men— few married women worked for wages— moved slowly and unevenly out of the work force...
...Old age had become a commodity...
...and a myriad of courses and programs offered in museums and other settings outside schools and colleges...
...Relatively few of the elderly lived in the old age homes that over decades had evolved from their origins as public poorhouses...
...In 1983, Congress raised the age for full Social Security benefits to sixty-seven for those born after 1960 and, then, in March 2000, unanimously lifted the retirement test on the earnings of Social Security recipients...
...As the price of southern congressional support, Social Security at first excluded domestic and agricultural workers, that is, most women and blacks...
...Reluctant to move in with children, or rejected by them, they needed nonfamily care and novel residential options...
...But, for the first time in history, the parents could live somewhere else, and for this both parents and children were usually grateful...
...She ended up—in her twenty-five-year career there—offering seminars on Emily Dickinson and the poet Robert Francis...
...I kept traveling to a minimum, fearful of being too far away to respond quickly to emergencies...
...A great many senior citizens also wanted to indulge voracious appetites for learning...
...Some firms limited all, or a large share, of pension investments to their own stock...
...The questions are at once deeply personal and universal...
...Forty percent of elderly Americans, like my mother, depended on Social Security for more than half their income, while the richest relied mainly on investment income...
...The Social Security Act created a social insurance program for the elderly that did not pay its first benefits until 1940...
...The new power of labor unions brought about the spread of private pensions and employer-based health care...
...Rising property values gave millions of American—that is, white American—couples an economic nest egg for old age...
...A book could be written about this process and its consequences...
...She bonded with her wonderful hospice crew—nurse, doctor, assistants, chaplain, social worker, volunteer...
...She had a deep dread of the unit...
...It started when women lacked the right to vote and ended when a woman was a serious candidate for president of the United States and women composed a majority of students in higher education...
...After the last episode, she had bounced so far that she was kicked out of hospice until her trajectory reversed and a serious decline set in...
...The leap in life expectancy was greater in the first than in the second half of the twentieth century...
...Changes to Social Security reinforced the diversifying effect of the ban on compulsory retirement...
...They also left me uncertain how to resolve some of the ethical issues that result from the transformation of old age...
...After my father died, when my mother was alone, every burned out light bulb was a crisis to which, from 350 miles away, I could not adequately respond...
...Increased longevity and better health care undermined the rationale for compulsory retirement, and older workers complained about age discrimination...
...They deepened my insight into the intersection of historical change with human lives, and they raised questions I would not otherwise have thought to ask...
...The Bureau of Labor Statistics predicted that between 2006 and 2016, the second fastest growing occupation in America would be “personal and home care aides” (50.6 percent) and the third, “home health aides” (48.7 percent...
...Many were single mothers, often immigrants, working two or three jobs to support their families...
...In Florida, I found a landscape shaped by the reciprocal desire of the elderly for warmth and sun and of the state for the revenue they brought...
...My maternal grandmothers, both outliving their husbands, pushed beyond the median, dying in their eighties, but, in retrospect, they seem more like people a decade older today...
...It was a boon for many of the disabled, who, like my mother’s brother, lacked any source of income...
...and continuing care communities, which offered a range of options from independent living to nursing home care...
...By pauperizing themselves, they, or their children, can look for nursing homes that will accept them as Medicaid patients...
...As I tried to help my mother through difficult years, finding a new place to live, navigating the intricacies of health insurance, learning a lot about caregivers, I could not help but reflect on the ways her unfolding story encapsulated the transformation of old age in America...
...The future promised, at best, more of the same...
...Although the number living with children increased with age—in 2000, 15 percent of women over eighty-four, for example—by historic standards the number was low...
...His peers had lived, for the most part with remarkable grace, through some of the most profound transformations (change is too tame a word) in human history...
...Her refusal to let go for a long time does not negate the reality that her last years, like those of so many around her, were the opposite of golden...
...ARTICLES The Death of Beatrice Reflections on Old Age in America MICHAEL B. KATZ I don’t know if my mother intended to die on Valentine’s Day...
...In the 1960s and 1970s, retirement age was more uniform than at any other time in American history, earlier or later...
...It was, in the first place, enormously confusing...
...FDR responded with immediate relief, followed by the 1935 Social Security Act—the charter of America’s federal welfare state...
...Thanks to pensions, Social Security, and a paid mortgage, my wife and I, barring medical catastrophe, will be able to choose whether to live independently, perhaps assisted by hired caregivers, or to move into a first-rate facility...
...My father’s mother, barely literate, from a village in Eastern Europe, crossed the Atlantic on a slow steamer, spent most of her adulthood in a wooden threedecker in Dorchester, Massachusetts, then, in her declining years, jetted across the country to pass her last days with her daughters in California...
...She found an outlet for her intellectuality, at last, in the 1970s through the Harvard Institute...
...In old age, most of them lacked the choices available to many elderly whites, who could convert home equity into the money needed for independent living or personal care...
...Her father had landed in the United State during the presidency of William McKinley, when 54 percent of the nation’s population lived in places with a population of one thousand or less...
...Before the expansion of Social Security benefits, the elderly were three times more likely to be poor than any other age group...
...As charming as it was, it struck me as a gilded cage...
...Some joined radical political movements advocating the Townsend Plan—a flat monthly pension for the elderly—or the even more left-leaning Lundeen Bill, which provided much greater government support...
...But is that selfish...
...But, tarred with the legacy of the poorhouse, they were, with good reason, dreaded by most elderly Americans, who turned to them only when family care was unavailable...
...Many, suffering some form of dementia, spent their days in wheelchairs looking vacantly at passersby...
...In her recent book 60 and Up: The Truth About Aging in America, Lillian B. Rubin, who, for nearly four decades, has provided penetrating, often painful, depictions of the stages in American lives, explodes it: “Getting old sucks...
...They cannot afford a good residential facility...
...there were intensive residential programs—elderhostels...
...She grew up in the largely Jewish section of Roxbury, Massachusetts...
...In the last decades of the twentieth century, a sea change in employee benefits fueled economic inequality among the elderly...
...in 1978, Congress raised the age of mandatory retirement to seventy and, in 1986, unanimously voted to ban compulsory retirement altogether (though for another seven years colleges and universities retained the right to force faculty to retire...
...The regime of adequate pensions, Social Security, and widespread home ownership that emerged in the third quarter of the twentieth century gave the gift of autonomy to a great many older Americans...
...In 1956, Disability Insurance embraced another large group...
...The stages in human lives, we believed, were products of culture and history as much as biology...
...The diffusion of homeownership joined the private welfare state and federal social insurance to boost the economic security of older Americans...
...Their work was physically hard and emotionally demanding, requiring tact, skill, and patience...
...The consequences are profound—from the depletion of the Social Security surplus to the cost of health care to the defeat of school bond issues and the reconfiguration of consumption...
...Retirement as a transition between work and a new life stage had not been invented...
...So it was not just the duration of life that had changed but the onset of decline...
...Eavesdropping on conversations taught me that the residents, mostly widows, are far from universally happy with their lives...
...By making retirement mandatory, employers reinforced sixty-five as the normal age for leaving work...
...At the same time, novel institutions appeared to serve the new senior citizen market...
...Or they’re lying...
...The need for autonomy remains alive even as the arena in which it can be exercised contracts...
...My paternal grandfather died in his fifties of complications from pneumonia, almost certainly a death preventable today, while my maternal grandfather, who died in his seventies, pretty well matched the norm for men who had reached sixty-five...
...In January 2008, we—my children, my wife, I—knew my mother had to move to the institution’s nursing home unit...
...Care for their parents, especially in the last years of life, remained a worry and responsibility...
...So much for the “golden years...
...My mother had an iron will and had fooled us often enough before, sinking almost to the point of extinction and then bouncing back...
...I heard, too, of the frequent deaths—the fact of life in an old age community to which it is hardest to adapt...
...They loved her in return...
...This is the program that Americans first thought of as “welfare...
...By the beginning of the twentieth century, one set of years, roughly between puberty and independent adulthood, had assumed so novel a character that it required the invention of a new life stage: adolescence...
...It was inherent in our situations...
...Together, private pensions, Social Security, Medicare, and home equity revolutionized old age in America...
...It was her misfortune to grow up at a time when young women from immigrant working-class families rarely attended college...
...The scope of the market first struck me when the AARP’s magazine, Modern Maturity, arrived unbidden after my parents gave me a membership in the organization in honor of my fiftieth birthday...
...Defined contribution pensions, which required employees to make their own investment decisions, replaced traditional defined benefit pensions...
...The Great Depression pounded elderly Americans ferociously as savings banks failed, local governments ran out of money, and welfare capitalism disappeared...
...The response by colleges and universities varied...
...In the book, we showed this by focusing on the history of the transitions to adulthood and old age...
...Along with the private welfare state, the expansion of Social Security benefits transformed the economic situation of most elderly Americans...
...The minority of men and women who reached age sixty-five could expect another dozen years, women a few more than men...
...Suddenly, they were confronted with huge bills, costs that had to be met until they passed another threshold that, finally, again earned them a prescription subsidy...
...By 2000, however, one of four women over the age of eighty-four lived in an institution...
...In 2000, the share of income flowing to the wealthiest 10 percent of elderly Americans had increased 13 percent in one decade, to reach 44 percent...
...This situation did not change very much between 1900 and the Great Depression...
...With birth rates high, couples in their fifties and sixties often had young children or teenagers at home...
...The comfort of our modest but pictureperfect house in suburban Marblehead, my dad’s job as a leather chemist, my acceptance by a great university: all these were an astonishing distance from Poland or the little shop in Chelsea...
...Roughly a quarter of Americans age sixty-five and older depended on Social Security and other government programs for almost all their income...
...Old age homes were the obvious first residential alternative to remaining at home...
...Then, too, the catalogs of products for the elderly started to arrive regularly...
...Much of the material in this essay is drawn from his book, co-authored with Mark Stern, One Nation Divisible: What America Was and What It Is Becoming (Russell Sage Foundation, 2006, 2009...
...By the late 1970s, private pensions covered nearly half of American workers...
...But huge numbers of people lack those options...
...The elderly lived far less often with their children, and the empty nest emerged as a new life stage...
...Working women followed the same pattern...
...I think it was her last way of showing her love...
...So my life experience and research and writing intertwined...
...Their homes became their principal asset...
...With better incomes, residential choices widened...
...The proportion eighty-five and over is the fastest growing segment of the population...
...Her parents had emigrated from Lithuania and Poland in the early twentieth century...
...No set age for leaving work existed...
...On my visits to my mother’s institution, I often thought, what a wonderful facility this is, how sensible a setting for one’s final years, but how I do not want to live here...
...In part, they reflected trends in education: the post–World War II expansion of higher education and increased education among women...
...The feminization of old age homes is one of the key institutional stories of the late twentieth century...
...Valentine’s Day had been a big deal when I was a child, with heartshaped cookies and red food dye in almost everything...
...assisted living facilities whose number increased 48 percent between 1998 and 2001...
...HILR was the best thing to happen to her in decades...
...By 2000, it had dropped to a little more than three to one and was still falling...
...The benefits provided by the few state pensions of the time did not cover the cost of survival...
...This is another lesson I learned from my mother...
...At least, that’s what I want to believe...
...In 1935, the Wagner Act legitimated unions...
...The webs of personal interactions punctuated her pain and depression with moments of warmth and pleasure...
...Newly mobilized elderly voters confronted President Franklin D. Roosevelt with demands for federal support...
...A male born at the start of the twentieth century could expect to live 47.9 years and a female 50.7...
...I don’t know what they were paid, but it was far less than they deserved...
...In the 1930s, the federal government began to insure home mortgages and encourage long-term amortization...
...In the first third of the twentieth century, public policy generally neglected the elderly...
...Unions had helped create a private welfare state that gave their members an unprecedented standard of living...
...When my dad retired, he joined her, finding in the seminars an outlet for his love of research...
...In 1955, the ratio of workers to Social Security recipients was eight to six...
...My dad, entering his senior year in college when his father died, had to bypass membership on varsity sports teams in order to complete his father’s plumbing and roofing contracts, essential to his mother’s support...
...serious peer-taught seminars as in Harvard’s Institute for Learning in Retirement (HILR...
...at century’s close, it was longer, more independent, and less impoverished...
...Over the course of the century, African American death rates went down dramatically but stayed about twice the rate for whites...
...For some with inner strength, like my mother, there were minor compensations...
...Since my dad died in December 1999, responsibility for looking out for my mother had fallen to me, their only child...
...Men eligible for Social Security began to rush out of the work force...
...Rubin’s analysis reinforces my own observations from nearly nine years of frequent visits to my mother in her continuing care community...
...At the start of the twentieth century, old age was a short, dependent, often poverty-ridden time of life...
...It covered the epoch from when automobiles were rare to the time when their oversupply has become a menace and from the time when radio was new to the Internet and cloud computing...
...Her mother, who scraped by with tiny public benefits and help from children, lived independently until almost the end of her life, caring for her mentally ill adult son...
...Old age was easier to recognize, and its endpoint was universal...
...Set in beautifully landscaped grounds, furnished like a gracious New England inn, immaculately clean, it is a superb facility, administered with efficiency, compassion, and flexibility by a mostly excellent staff...
...This shift affected millions of workers, exacerbating inequality as some workers proved more successful investors than others...
...As economic inequality widens, pensions become less common, savings even harder to accumulate, and home equity a less reliable cushion, this is a privilege that fewer and fewer Americans will enjoy...
...The rest, however, remained vulnerable...
...Without the equity in the apartment she and my father had purchased, my mother could not have afforded the entrance fee to her continuing care community, and my wife and I could not have paid it...
...They wanted the elderly out of the work force, but their mounting campaign for mandatory retirement confronted an obstacle: the virtual absence of private or public pensions...
...They had lost independence...
...Had she been of this generation, I am sure she would have been a professor of English at a fine college or university, writing stunning books...
...and its modest payments were not enough to support independent living...
...My mother’s long journey began in the presidency of William Howard Taft and ended in the presidency of Barack Obama...
...By mid-century it had reached 65.6 and 71.0 for men and women respectively, rising to 74.1 and 79.5 by century’s end...
...Her hospice nurse, who knew her well, said that she would choose the time to give up her long struggle with pain and debility, and I believed the nurse...
...She read it and said that she would love to attend...
...in 1949, rulings of the Labor Relations Board compelled employers to bargain over employee benefits...
...Those who did were disproportionately men because children proved more willing to take in their aged mothers than fathers...
...These included residential communities restricted to senior citizens...
...Another often noted fact about the elderly is that there are so many more of them...
...private pensions were nearly nonexistent...
...This remains their only institutional option...
...In 1965, Medicare greatly strengthened economic security and, like Social Security, mitigated economic inequalities...
...At nearly ninetysix and a half, Beatrice Katz had reached one of her goals, outliving her oldest sister by a few months...
...In the end, the elderly with high drug costs fell into the infamous donut hole, the gap between reaching the limit of prescription drug reimbursement and catastrophic costs...
...Their writings threw a scientific cover over the goals of Progressive-era labor economists and employers who wanted to rationalize labor markets, in part by excluding workers older than sixty or sixty-five,who were, they believed, unable to keep pace with modern technology...
...Until the mid-1950s, when Social Security benefits began to render it unnecessary, Old Age Assistance served more Americans than Aid to Dependent Children, which was also part of the 1935 legislation (as was Unemployment Insurance...
...Bill and the mass production of suburbs produced a sharp rise in homeownership, especially among white Americans...
...Still, in the closing decades of the twentieth century, old age was redefined as a stage of life characterized ideally—though often compromised in reality— by years of leisure, independent living, and economic security...
...Private pensions helped fuel the invention of retirement...
...When I looked at the periodic expense reports Medicare sent my mother, I shuddered to think how she and my dad would have survived had they entered old age prior to 1965...
...The new old age has called forth an array of goods and services sometimes offering real value, responding to genuine needs but, often, directed just at extracting dollars from the vast elderly market...
...As more firms slashed retiree health benefits and pensions, their prospects dimmed, and they were forced to fight defensive battles against the privatization of Social Security and cuts in Medicare...
...Children, by and large, were off the hook...
...Well,” my mother said, “I can’t go with my hair looking like this...
...Many seniors, who need more income than Social Security provides, take parttime jobs in the fast food industry or with bigbox retailers like Wal-Mart...
...There was still plenty to do for her, but I knew she was in a secure setting...
...I will be one of the lucky ones...
...Otherwise, when they can no longer care for themselves, the burden falls to their children...
...When she was young, her father abandoned his home and six children, setting up his tiny tailoring and cleaning shop across the harbor in Chelsea and living in a rented room...
...When, like Enron, they failed, employees lost all their retirement savings...
...Not only smart, she had intellectual passion...
...at the same time, private welfare helped stratify the work force by abandoning nonunionized workers like my father, whose negligible pension compelled him to work into his seventies...
...And, if so, how long should I wait...
...Fraternal orders, savings banks, and insurance offered a little help to the fortunate few able to save a part of their income...
...How the redefinition of old age has reshaped American education, and how education has reshaped old age, remains the topic for still another book...
...Sometimes they remained heads of their own households...
...The rising cost of prescription drugs and medical care, crippling for many elderly citizens, fueled economic inequality...
...What would happen to newly independent seniors when they became too infirm to tend their empty nests...
...As our bodies fail, holding onto a remnant of autonomy enables us to fade without our humanity and self-worth being totally destroyed...
...The new old age also provoked imaginative institutional responses...
...During most of the twentieth century, the share of the elderly who lived in them hovered around 2 percent or 3 percent...
...One of the themes that interested us most was the history of the life course...
...I recall the day when a brochure advertising the new institute arrived in the mail...
...Yes, I know about all those books and articles extolling the wonders of what the media call the ‘new old age.’ I’ve been reading them for quite a while now and can only conclude that they’re either written by forty-year-olds who, like children afraid of the dark, draw rosy pictures as they try to convince themselves that no unknown monsters await them...
...As it happened, in those years my colleague Mark Stern and I were at work on a book intended to situate the 2000 census in the context of twentieth-century social and economic trends...
...Social Security now protected families as well as individuals...
...My mother labeled nursing homes “God’s waiting rooms...
...Others, although still mentally competent, clearly were depressed—and why not...
...When she raised a problem I could not solve over the telephone, I knew whom to call and had confidence someone would respond...
...So-called welfare capitalism, restricted to a small minority of workers, did not support retired workers...
...I ran to get the hairdresser, who came in to fix her hair...
...Developers, abetted by the state, had erased much of a once beautiful, ecologically sensitive terrain, covering it with golf courses, condominiums, retirement communities, and shopping plazas with restaurants specializing in early-bird specials...
...Economic inequality started to increase—an unanticipated result of legislation designed to lift constraints that no longer made sense...
...Should I not limit the burdens on my children in the same way, regardless of my preference for independent, non-institutional living...
...The legislation also created Old Age Assistance, a federal-state program of matching grants, which paid benefits immediately...
...As a historian of the life course, I experienced my parents’ declining years with interest as well as concern...
...By 1960, 40 percent between the ages of sixty and sixty-six had left...
...Over the course of my visits, I saw many residents decline, sometimes gradually, sometimes with startling speed...
...My dad and I encouraged her to apply...
...What do I owe my children...
...AARP, through its for-profit arm, ceaselessly peddled its insurance and credit cards...
...But, still, with increasing frequency, she said that she was ready—and wanted—to die...
...Although redlining in federal and private underwriting excluded racially and ethnically diverse neighborhoods, the net effect of federal policies lowered the cost of buying homes...
...In 1972, indexation protected benefits from dilution by inflation and tilted them toward low-income workers...
...The 2006 introduction of a Medicare drug benefit helped, but at a cost...
...Because she lived in Massachusetts and I in Philadelphia, her care posed logistical problems compounded by the contradiction between her fierce desire for independence and her chronic illnesses and legal blindness...
...That was something her father would never have supported...
...Insatiably interested in other people, she learned the life histories of her caregivers and dispensed advice...
...When I traveled, I could tell the staff...
...As a result, women and men could collect full Social Security benefits and continue working...
...it was the most unequal income distribution among them since 1960...
...She started out participating nervously in seminars...
...Satisfied that she looked okay, she allowed herself to be accompanied to her new room, where she surprised us by coming, as it were, back to life, a bounce that lasted for several months...
...It always has, it always will...
...Mostly, it was widowhood that turned seniors toward assisted living and nursing homes...
Vol. 57 • January 2010 • No. 1
