POLICY
AARP’s Blueprint: No Doom, No Gloom
What it all adds up to, this Blueprint tells us, is that things aren’t as bad as you may think they are.
By Jerry Tallmer
The American Association of Retired Persons suddenly finds its name to be a contradiction in terms. Any minute now it is going to have to start calling itself the American Association of Relevant Persons, or Reinvigorated Persons, or Radiantly Reusable Persons, or Indispensable Persons Over the Age of XX With No Thought of Retiring Whatsoever.
“When we look at population and economics,” says Lois Aronstein, New York State director of AARP, “we see that older people are going to work a lot longer, for a lot of reasons, including the fact that they’re healthier.
“The first of the post-World War II baby boomers will be 62 in the year 2008. By 2015 we expect there will be 70,000,000 baby boomers over 65. The concept of retiring at 60 and living twenty or thirty years longer is now not economically feasible. People want to remain productive, and that, incidentally, affects mental health for the better.
“What AARP is saying is that people should work as long as they are able to work and want to work.”
AARP is also saying exactly that, and a lot more than that, in a new national prospectus, Reimagining America: AARP’s Blueprint for the Future.
Its 41 densely packed pages touch on a whole range of simmering agendas – health care, Medicare, pensions, job prospects, Social Security, livable communities, and much else – but what it all adds up to, this Blueprint tells us, is that things aren’t as bad as you may think they are, aging or no aging.
Indeed, says Ms. Aronstein, “we look on aging in America as an opportunity and a challenge, rather than doom and gloom. As the baby boomers moved through the population, we had to build new schools, new hospitals, new institutions. Now that they’re moving into seniordom, we have to come up with other new institutions.”
Such as?
“Everything that goes along with health care – that in fact being the major reason for this entire Blueprint. Long-term care. Home- and community-based care. And the pressures health care is going to put on society.
“Then, as we all know these days, there’s what’s happening out there with pensions. AARP is very focused on the pension rights of all workers, and on policy and legislation to make pensions more stable.
“Same thing for Social Security. People can’t live on Social Security alone, but it’s needed as a guaranteed benefit. The AARP is against – strongly against – Bush’s plan for personal private accounts to replace Social Security. Our major campaign last year was to get private accounts off the table.
“The next thing is to make Social Security solvent for the long run – a much more complicated problem that inevitably means some pain in trade-offs and choices. Which calls for dialogue, study, discussion of different options. Most painful would be cutting benefits or raising the age at which you collect. AARP doesn’t want that either, but those two are among the choices.
“What we do support is raising the earnings cap on the Social Security payroll tax. It now stops at $90,000. Which means that even if you earn $250,000 a year, you stop paying at $90,000. Just by raising the cap to $130,000 a year we can solve 46 percent of the Social Security issue.
“That’s a biggie,” says New York’s AARP director. “A pretty hot political football. And it’s only one part of the solution. Another, which is not very popular, is requiring all new state and federal employees to pay into the Social Security system.”
May we, Ms. Aronstein, come back to Medicare – in specific, Medicare Part D, the new prescription-drug “benefit” that’s more baffling and a lot more problematic than the quantum theory? AARP took a lot of heat for supporting it.
“Yes. Well, you have to remember that whereas inflation is presently running between 3 and 4 percent a year, prescription drugs last year rose 6 percent. AARP’s position is that now, with Bush’s [Part D] plan, Medicare for the first time ever includes drugs. It was a question of supporting this plan or nothing; of waiting another decade for Medicare coverage of prescription drugs. So while Part D is not a perfect plan, it is an insurance – which if anybody does not have any kind of [pharmaceutical] insurance, you should now absolutely take part in it.
“It’s admittedly complicated. There are 20 firms in New York State that offer a Part D plan, some more upscale than others. AARP works with United Health Care. If you were my Dad, I’d sit you down and have you go to your drugstore to see what plans they accept. Start there. Step two, look at your drugs and see which are covered by which plan. Yes, you can go crazy. It’s like life insurance. Is life insurance easy?”
If all this is beyond you – or beyond your parents or grandparents – there’s an agency called HIICAP (New York State Health Insurance Information Counseling & Assistance Program) that will walk your folks or you through the maze. Just call the NYC Department for the Aging’s HIICAP Helpline at (212) 333-5511, or, simpler yet, just dial 311 and ask for HIICAP.
