Category: General
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To Our Readers
Thank you for visiting. We will not be adding new content, but we are leaving up Over 65 as an archive of personal essays and policy commentaries examining the challenges facing our aging society.
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Hiatus
Because of a combination of a sabbatical for one of us and a series of other commitments, Over 65 will take a hiatus from publication until May, 2015. We appreciate the interest and engagement of our writers and readers, and look forward to resuming publication in the spring. In the meanwhile, we want to wish…
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Palliative Care – Not Just for the Dying
I used to think that palliative care was just for people who were dying. Then I found out—about a dozen years ago—that palliative care had expanded its original focus on end-stage cancer patients to include people with serious illness throughout the course of their disease (or diseases). Palliative care, I realized, is far more than…
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The Grand Alliance
Grandparents and grandchildren have a natural alliance. Both have inevitable conflicts and competition with the generation between them, but the relationship between grandparents and grandchildren is insulated from parent-child tensions. The same sort of alliance potentially holds true to some extent with generations, such as over 65ers and those under 35. Some recent examples in…
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Life Can Turn On a Dime
[Introduction from Jim Sabin: This anonymous post was published recently on the Age with Spirit blog. Via Al Martin, the editor of the blog and author of a number of posts for Over 65, I’ve received permission from the anonymous author to republish it. I wanted to do so because it discusses the psychological transition…
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Re-Designing Medicare
Under the headline “Greedy Geezers,” the cover of the March 28, 1988 issue of the New Republic shows a phalanx of angry over 65ers surging forward, toting golf clubs and fishing rods. The accompanying article by Henry Fairlie, 64 at the time, excoriated over 65ers as being out for themselves and ready to bankrupt the…
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Sex after Sixty-Five
“No personal confession or revelation impends here, but these feelings in old folks are widely treated like a raunchy secret.” (From Roger Angell’s “This Old Man: Life in the Nineties.”) In contrast to my usual posts on this site, there will be no personal revelations by me here either, other than to say that sex…
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Caring for Nursing Home Patients under Medicare
What drove me crazy about practicing medicine in a nursing home wasn’t the patients, although with their many medical problems often including cognitive impairment they were a challenge; and it wasn’t the families, though with their anxiety and attentiveness and sometimes their guilt they were an even greater challenge. What drove me crazy about nursing…
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Why I Hope Not to Die at 75
I feel uniquely qualified to comment on Zeke Emanuel’s much-discussed article “Why I Hope to Die at 75.” I’m smack in the middle of the year he hopes will be his last. In addition, many years ago I wrote a book about health care organizational ethics with him (and Steven Pearson). I loved working with…