Getting Senior Issues on the Agenda
It can be tough to get policymakers and elected officials to understand and address the issues that matter to and for older adults. Is ageism behind this dearth of progress?
BY TOM GRESHAM
to travel back more than 50 years to when a series of milestone pieces of legislation radically improved conditions for many older adults. That’s where Brian Kaskie’s thoughts go.
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Kaskie, an associate professor of health management and policy at the University of Iowa, points to the 1960s, when the United States expanded the Social Secu- rity System, passed the Older Americans Act, and created Medicare and Medicaid. At the time, Kaskie says, the problems faced by an aging population were perva- sive and relatively uniform, such as insuf-
f you want to understand why prog- ress on crucial issues related to ag- ing seems slow and elusive in to- day’s policy climate, you may have
ficient retirement savings and poor health care coverage. Those transformative federal legislative efforts proved to be sustainable in later decades, and Kaskie says their enduring success raising the quality of life for older adults helps explain the inadequate atten- tion paid to aging in policymaking today. “It seems what's happened is that we put
all this on autopilot,” says Kaskie, editor- in-chief of Public Policy & Aging Report. “And any political activity that has to
do with the financing of older persons or the health care of older persons re- ally is left to the halls of bureaucracy. It's just not part of any national agenda that Congress or the president really spends a lot of time on.”
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