All posts tagged "Aging"

Donald Trump has made Joe Biden’s advancing age one of his main campaign rallying points, trying to position himself as an energetic alternative to the sometimes unsteady 81-year-old Democratic incumbent.

But the Republican former president is celebrating his 78th birthday on Friday, and also has shown signs of slowing down, both physically and mentally.

ALSO READ: Attention Lincoln and Reagan: GOP senators scramble history with Trump greatness claim...

More than a year after the federal government first cut off her disability benefits, Denise Woods drives nightly to strip malls, truck stops, and parking lots around Savannah, Georgia, looking for a safe place to sleep in her Chevy. Woods, 51, said she had rented a three-bedroom house she shared with her adult son and grandson until March 2022, when the government terminated her disability payments without notice. According to letters sent by the Social Security Administration, the agency determined it had been overpaying Woods and demanded she send back nearly $58,000. Woods couldn’t come up ......

After an unprecedented crackdown on misleading advertising claims by insurers selling private Medicare Advantage and drug plans, the Biden administration hopes to unleash a special weapon to make sure companies follow the new rules: you. Officials at the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services are encouraging seniors and other members of the public to become fraud detectives by reporting misleading or deceptive sales tactics to 800-MEDICARE, the agency’s 24-hour information hotline. Suspects include postcards designed to look like they’re from the government and TV ads with celebrities promis......

“It is emotionally and physically draining.” Natasha Lazartes 39, Brooklyn, New YorkTherapistI am 39 years old. I had to care for my father, who passed from cancer in 2019; my mother, who passed in November 2021 from cancer; and since my mother’s passing, I have inherited the care of my grandmother. She is 97, diagnosed with moderate dementia, and considered high risk to be left home alone. We had been applying for Medicaid long-term care to receive a home health aide since early November 2021. She finally got a home health aide in January 2022, but it’s been a nightmare. They are so desperate......

For the first time, people worried about their risk of Alzheimer’s disease can go online, order a blood test, and receive results in the privacy of their homes. This might seem appealing on the surface, but the development has Alzheimer’s researchers and clinicians up in arms. The Quest Diagnostics blood test, AD-Detect, measures elevated levels of amyloid-beta proteins, a signature characteristic of Alzheimer’s. Introduced in late July, the test is targeted primarily at people 50 and older who suspect their memory and thinking might be impaired and people with a family history of Alzheimer’s ......

This article originally appeared in KFF Health News.

It was a regrettable mistake. But Kim Sylvester thought she was doing the right thing at the time.

Her 80-year-old mother, Harriet Burkel, had fallen at her home in Raleigh, North Carolina, fractured her pelvis, and gone to a rehabilitation center to recover. It was only days after the death of Burkel’s 82-year-old husband, who’d moved into a memory care facility three years before.

With growing distress, Sylvester had watched her mother, who had emphysema and peripheral artery disease, become increasingly frail and isolated. “I would say, ‘Can I help you?’ And my mother would say, ‘No, I can do this myself. I don’t need anything. I can handle it,’” Sylvester told me....