A surveillance camera on a white background.

Combatting Elder Abuse in Long-Term Care: Challenges and Opportunities of Electronic Monitoring

By Laura C. Hoffman

The aging population is growing at an extraordinary rate in the U.S. By 2040, it is anticipated that the U.S. aging population (defined as those ages 65 and older) will double, totaling 80 million.

Given this growth, preventing elder abuse must be at the forefront of policymaking. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has recognized elder abuse as a “serious” problem that is commonly occurring, yet significantly underreported, in the U.S.

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Health visitor and a senior woman during home visit.

Caring for Patients with Serious Illness: Insights from Kristofer Smith

Kristofer Smith, MD, MPP is the Chief Medical Officer of Landmark Heath, where he oversees efforts to establish a high-quality and clinically effective home-based medical care model for patients with serious illness.

We sat down with Dr. Smith to discuss his experience caring for patients with serious illness and developing programs to provide health care at home, among other topics. The following interview has been edited and condensed. Read More

hand signing form.

Legal Preparedness for Aging and Caregiving

By Sharona Hoffman

During 2013 and 2014, I endured a very difficult 18 months. Both of my parents died, my mother-in-law died, and my husband was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease at the age of 55. As I went through all of this, I learned a great deal about getting older, getting sick, facing the end of life, and caregiving. As a result of my personal experiences and my professional background as a Professor of Law and Bioethics at Case Western Reserve University, I wrote a book called Aging with a Plan: How a Little Thought Today Can Vastly Improve Your Tomorrow.

The book addresses many legal, financial, medical, social, and other support systems for aging and caregiving. In this article, I discuss the legal documents that every American adult should have. These documents can help ensure that your finances and health care are well-managed as you age and that your wishes will be followed after death.

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Abstract glitch with word SCAM on 100 Dollar bill. Concept art for Online scam.

Rethinking Senior Scams?

By James Toomey

Many people, including, it seems, most advocates for law reform, assume that older adults are uniquely vulnerable to scams, and indeed that senior scams are a unique social problem demanding a unique legal solution. But in “The Age of Fraud” (forthcoming in the Harvard Journal on Legislation, winter 2023), about which I’ve blogged here before, I reported the results of an empirical study suggesting that, in fact, younger adults were as much as three times more likely to engage with scammers during the first year of the COVID pandemic than older adults.

One possible implication of this finding — if indeed it is generalizable — which I discuss but don’t commit to in the paper, is that more people are more vulnerable to scams — and the polished tactics of psychological manipulation used by scammers — than has been generally appreciated. But if scams are not a bounded problem of those who are in some sense more psychologically vulnerable (as older adults are thought of in, at least, the popular imagination), we might want to rethink scams — what they are, how we fight them, and how we treat and think about their victims.

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Person in nursing home.

Struggles Over Care Will Shape the Future of Work

By Andrew Milne

The future of work will largely be the future of care work. Health care is rapidly becoming the largest employer in the U.S., expanding to serve the fastest growing demographic, aging seniors. As a lawyer for seniors in need of free legal services, I see my clients struggle to access care made scarce by the for-profit care industry’s understaffing and underpaying of workers attempting to meet the growing need. The future of work and of aging will be shaped by struggles over care from both giving and receiving ends, perhaps against those profiting in between.

Recall that the first COVID-19 outbreak in the U.S. spread between nursing homes. These facilities, like most nursing homes, are for-profit businesses that pad their margins by cutting labor costs. The resulting understaffing has deadly effects in normal times. The pandemic intensified those effects, as underpaid care workers, forced to work at multiple facilities to survive, unintentionally spread the virus between facilities.

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Top view of white cubicles in modern office with white walls and carpeted floor. 3d rendering.

Managing Cognitive Decline Concerns in the Workplace

By Sharona Hoffman

As the American population ages, employers must contend with the growing challenge of cognitive decline in the workplace.

Cognitive decline becomes more common as individuals age. The risk of Alzheimer’s disease doubles every five years after age 65, and almost one-third of people over 85 have the disease. And, as detailed in my book, Aging with a Plan: How a Little Thought Today Can Vastly Improve Your Tomorrow, the American population is aging. By 2034, about 77 million people will be seniors, accounting for 21% of U.S. residents.

Additionally, many professionals work past retirement age. For example, over 31% of physicians are over 60, and 15% of attorneys are over 65. The average age of federal judges is 69.

Considered together, these trends substantiate concerns about the increasing prevalence of cognitive decline in the workplace. Recent research provides further support: when Yale New Haven Hospital tested clinicians on staff who were seventy and older, it found that almost 13% had significant cognitive deficits.

Older employees often bring a wealth of experience and highly refined skills to their jobs. They can therefore add great strength to the workforce. Yet, employees with cognitive decline can cause a multitude of complex challenges in the workplace. They can threaten workplace productivity, workforce morale, and even public safety.

How might employers address cognitive decline concerns? As I argue in my article “Cognitive Decline and the Workplace” (forthcoming in the Wake Forest Law Review), there are several options, but many are legally and ethically problematic.

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Call from unknown number on iPhone.

The Surprising Shape of COVID Fraud

By James Toomey

When the world went into lockdown in March 2020, many commentators noticed that social isolation could offer scammers an unprecedented opportunity to take advantage of people’s fear and loneliness. But they didn’t anticipate that fraud would generally affect a range of age groups. Indeed, much like the virus itself, the risks of frauds and scams related to the COVID pandemic were thought primarily to affect older adults.

This assumption seems to have been wrong. Recently, I conducted a study on the prevalence of scam-victimization during the pandemic across age groups. Specifically, I recruited two populations — one of adults between 25 and 35 and one of adults over than 65—and asked whether they had been contacted by people making specific fraudulent promises during the pandemic, and whether they’d engaged with the scammer by giving personal information, sending money, or clicking a link. In the study populations, the younger group engaged with scammers three times more frequently than the older group — a disparity that was statistically significant and persisted regardless of how I sliced the data.

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Blister pack of pills, but instead of bills dollar bills are rolled up in the packaging

What Democrats’ Drug Pricing Plan Means for Consumers

By Cathy Zhang

At the start of the month, Democrats announced a new drug pricing plan, detailed in the House’s Build Back Better Act (H.R. 5376). In the immediate short term, the drug pricing plan has enabled the $1.75 trillion bill to go forward through the House. If ultimately enacted, it will generate savings for consumers, some more directly than others, and at a more modest pace and magnitude than many had hoped.

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