Dispatches from the events and lectures at the 2008 AARP Staff & Volunteer Summit and the AARP Life@50+ National Event in Washington, D.C.

• Care for the Caregiver
• Foods for Healthy Living
• Using Medicines Wisely 
• Healthy Living Can Cut Medical Costs
• Member No. 40 Million
• Politics and Policy in the 21st Century
• AARP in the Future
• The Sleeping Giant of Politics
• Preparing for Global Future Will Involve Sacrifice, Says Zakaria

Care for the Caregiver
Posted by Barbara Basler — September 8, 2008 — 12:00 p.m.

About 44 million Americans act as caregivers to their spouse, parent or other adult family member or friend, a role that can be stressful—physically, emotionally and financially. Their quiet service as caregivers in their own homes is valued at a whopping $350 billion a year, according to experts who spoke at a workshop at AARP’s Life@50-Plus National Event and Expo. More>>

Foods for Healthy Living
Posted by Barbara Basler — September 8, 2008 — 12:00 p.m.

Food may be the best medicine for a healthy life, according to nutrition expert Joy Bauer, who says select foods can actually improve a number of conditions that bedevil men and women as they age—from arthritis pain to memory loss and mood swings. Speaking at the AARP Life@50+/National Event and Expo Friday, Bauer, the author of Joy Bauer’s Food Cures, said it’s always better to get nutrients through healthy foods rather than supplements. More>>

 Take the Challenge: Using Medicines Wisely
Posted by Pat Barry — September 5, 2008 — 5:30 p.m.

How wisely do you use medicines? Challenging AARP members on their prescription drug knowledge during a workshop at AARP’s Life@50+ national member event and expo in Washington, experts invited them to pick the right answer to multiple-choice questions. How did you do?

Healthy Living Can Cut Medical Costs
Posted by Pat Barry — September 5, 2008 — 5 p.m.

Health care now costs an average of $7,868 a year for each person in the United States—far more than in other Western countries—and will rise to $13,101 by 2017 if nothing is done to rein in escalating costs. Cutting that price tag means that people need to take personal responsibility for leading healthy lifestyles, according to health policy experts at AARP’s Life@50+ National Event and Expo in Washington. More >>

AARP Celebrates Member No. 40 Million
Posted by AARP Bulletin Staff — September 4, 2008 — 4:30 p.m.

Photo by Veronika Lukasova

David Squires, a journalist from Hampton, Va., was welcomed today as AARP’s 40 millionth member. He accepted his lifetime membership before thousands of members gathered in Washington for AARP’s celebration of its 50th anniversary.

The 50-year-old Squires, a native of Hortonville, S.C., graduated from the University of North Carolina. He writes the urban affairs column for the Daily Press in Newport News, Va. He has worked for more than 10 newspapers and was one of the first editors of AOL Black Voices. He and his wife have two children.

As number 40 million, Squires received a gift check from AARP, plus other prizes and discounts amounting to $7,000.

Politics and Policy in the 21st Century ... and by That, We Mean Health Care
Posted by Elizabeth Nolan Brown — September 4, 2008 — 1:22 p.m.

Photo by Veronika Lukasova

Health care dominated the AARP Staff and Volunteer Summit panel discussion on politics and policy in the 21st century yesterday afternoon.

With nods to the importance of energy independence, campaign finance reform and redistricting, panelists Peter Orszag, David Walker, Mike McCurry and Linda E. Tarplin focused primarily on the challenges the United States faces when it comes to providing for the uninsured, reining in health care spending and ending partisan gridlock on health care reform.

Speaker Fareed Zakaria stressed earlier in the day that partisanship in Washington has slowed our nation’s progress in finding innovative solutions to health care challenges, and the panelists agreed.

“We know what a centrist reform platform on health care would look like,” said McCurry, principal of public affairs and strategic communication firm Public Strategies Inc. “But it’s going to require some sacrifice if we’re going to succeed in creating a centrist solution.”

Tarplin, Walker and Orszag also stressed the need for compromise, small steps and incremental solutions.

“It’s going to take a series of reforms in installments over years,” said Walker, president and CEO of the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, emphasizing the need for setting a budget on what the federal government will spend on health care, developing universal best-practices standards for improving health care quality and minimizing costs, and improving personal responsibility and accountability in the medical system.

“There is probably as much as 700 billion in health care delivered each year that does not improve health outcomes,” said Orszag, director of the Congressional Budget Office. “We need to do much more testing of what works and what doesn’t. And we need to align financial incentives with better care instead of more care. Right now we have incentives for more care, and guess what we get?”

Orszag also championed improving health information technology, suggesting the federal government speed up the process by giving doctors and hospitals a deadline for complying, after which they would lose reimbursement through Medicare and Medicaid.

Turning for a moment from health care to the general political climate, McCurry expressed confidence in the political leanings of the post-boomer generations.

While the older generations look at politics through a “divided ideological prism, people under 25, that’s where this idea of transpartisanship takes place, because they’re not particularly ideological and they’re not particularly fond of either political party,” he said. “I am wildly optimistic about what will happen. We’ve lived in gridlock, but if you talk to people younger than 45, they have a very different idea of the way politics works.”

When those in the audience were asked if they shared McCurry’s optimism, however, less than half raised their hands. And other panelists seemed skeptical of McCurry’s post-boomer “transpartisanship” premise.

“I just don’t think it’s all about the young people,” said Tarplin, founder of the consulting firm Tarplin, Downs and Young. “I think it’s about everybody in this room.

“It’s really beholden on all of us to want to change the system as it’s working today,” she added. “We’re not going to leave it to the next generation.”

AARP in the Future
Posted by Elizabeth Nolan Brown — September 4, 2008 — 10:55 a.m.

Left to Right: Bill Novelli, Howard, Byck, Nataki Clarke, Jeannine English. Photo by Veronika Lukasova

AARP CEO Bill Novelli spoke with key AARP leaders yesterday afternoon about the organization's future, in a roundtable discussion at the AARP Staff and Volunteer Summit.

Joining Novelli were Jeannine English, president of AARP California; Nataki Clarke, director of online marketing; and Howard Byck, vice president of AARP Services' Lifestyle Products and Services.

The group agreed that AARP needs to be more proactive in reaching out to the post-boomer generations.

"We were maybe a little late to the party when it came to boomers," said Byck. “We need to learn from [this] when we deal with Generation X and Generation Y, and one of the ways we can do this is through the world of technology."

Novelli emphasized the need to focus on going digital, "because that's where the members are, the post-boomers are, and that's where the cost efficiencies are."

The group also spoke of AARP's need to be more institutionally flexible, as well as more responsive and agile, a task that can be difficult for an organization with as large a staff and as large a membership as AARP.

"This year, at our member event, we're going to celebrate our 40 millionth member," said Novelli. "What a thing to be proud of! And yet the thing is, every new member costs us more than they bring in. So we've got to figure out a way to deal with this paradox."

"There are a lot of people concerned about AARP getting too big," said Byck. "Growth is important, but not for growth's sake. It's how do we grow with conscience, and do it in the ways that only AARP can do it?"

"We shouldn't be apologetic about raising revenue to do what we do, which is change the world," Byck added.

"The triple bottom line," said Novelli, "is whatever we do, we want it to have … social impact. We want it to have member value. And then the third thing, hopefully, is it brings in revenue, which we reinvest in the enterprise. That is really what AARP is trying to do."

The Sleeping Giant of Politics
Posted by Elizabeth Nolan Brown — September 3, 2008 — 3:24 p.m.

Joseph F. Coughlin. —Photo by Veronika Lukasova

"Transportation … is going to be the sleeping giant of politics. Seventy percent of boomers bought a house where transit either does not serve or does not serve well. What do you think their politics of passion are going to be when they have their money, they have their health, and the closest thing they can do on a Friday night is walk two miles to the CVS?

“We did a survey at the AgeLab with [organizations] that are in charge of your transportation future. Fifty-two percent disagree and 17 percent strongly disagree that they are doing adequate things to deal with the transportation needs of the aging baby boomers. Even if you decided right now, today, to change the national transportation policy of the United States, it would take decades to change the infrastructure we have today, even if we worked really hard.”
 
—Joseph F. Coughlin, founder and director of the MIT AgeLab

Preparing for Global Future Will Involve American Sacrifice, Says Zakaria
Posted by Elizabeth Nolan Brown — September 3, 2008 — 10:30 a.m.

Photo by Veronika Lukasova

Fareed Zakaria called on the citizens of this nation to accept some sacrifices in order to prepare for the global future, and for politicians to be more honest about what these sacrifices will be.

Speaking before a crowd at the AARP Staff & Volunteer Summit in Washington, D.C., this morning, Zakaria—editor of Newsweek International and host of CNN’s weekly international news program Fareed Zakaria GPS—chastised politicians for selling citizens the myth that we can “get everything we want” in this country.

“One of the things democracies have difficulty doing is accepting short-term pain for long-term gain, and we’ve sort of conned ourselves into believing that if we max out 14 credit cards … and don’t worry about the vitality of the entitlement programs, it will all work out,” Zakaria said. “That has been the cancer in the system.”

Politicians, along with organizations such as AARP, need to “start preparing the groundwork for people to make sacrifices,” he said. “Who has proposed a gas tax? Entitlement reform that will involve some cuts? Health care that will involve some rationing? Nobody is talking about that.”

The underlying premise of Zakaria’s speech and of his recent book, The Post-American World, is that we are witnessing the rise of a “new world,” one that is truly global and one in which America cannot hope to retain the same sort of unilateral global influence it has enjoyed for the past few decades.

In 2007, the economies of 124 countries grew at 4 percent a year or more. Thirty years ago, only 20 or so countries saw this sort of growth.

“You have a global economy that for the first time is truly global,” said Zakaria. Spurred by forces that are political (the demise of communism and state centralism and the relative triumph of free markets and capitalism as a political system), economic (the freeing up of capital markets so money can flow more freely around the world) and technological (global connectivity), non-Western nations are seeing unprecedented industrial, technological and social progress.

This is especially important as it applies to India and China, countries with a combined population of 2.5 billion. But even Africa, long considered impervious to modernization, has become a part of this new world order, with 33 countries enjoying 4 percent growth in 2007.

“This is producing a certain kind of political confidence, a real sense of assertion, nationalism and pride” in small countries around the globe, says Zakaria. And as a result, “the global narrative” is no longer “made in America, and it’s not made at CNN and it’s not made by the BBC.”

But the “rise of the rest” doesn’t have to be something for Americans to fear, Zakaria insisted; rather, it leads to “a world to be engaged.” The new order is, in fact, the world America wanted to create—one of open markets, increasing democracy and global technology. The danger, he said, is becoming stagnant. We do not want historians to look back and say “Americans were able to globalize the world—they just forgot in the process to globalize themselves.”

This country’s world-class universities, hard-working immigrant population, enormous economic flexibility and resilient spirit will all be assets in navigating the global future. The biggest deterrent, said Zakaria, will be the federal government, which has become “brain-dead” and “stuck in a partisan gridlock where it is simply impossible to get things done.”

Zakaria urged AARP to continue pushing its Divided We Fail campaign and emphasizing the need for bipartisan reform and compromise, even when it involves unpleasant truths.

“Washington, the politicians who are scared to act … they will not [lead]. They are rarely willing to be bold and chart a new course,” he concluded. “They are going to be led by representatives of the people.”