Posted on December 29, 2006 by Jason
Palo Alto Daily News, December 29th, 2006
On a daily basis, four or five seniors walk into the Palo Alto Walgreens with questions about Medicare Part D.
“Most
don’t understand it all,” pharmacist Shazia Sana said of the federal
health insurance program’s prescription drug coverage.
Seniors
over the age of 65 have until Dec. 31 to enroll or change their plans,
but studies show that the complexity of the system is discouraging
seniors from making switches that could save them money.
Most
local health care groups say the number of seniors looking at their
plans is down this year, compared to last year when the prescription
drug benefit began.
“I think they’re really confused. They’re
going to wait to the last minute,” said Zena Vigileos, coordinator of
the Fair Oaks Intergenerational Center in Redwood City.
Plans
can annually change the price of drugs, the co-payment for a doctor’s
visit, or even limit the amount of available drugs, said Conor Lee,
spokesman for Senior Educators, a San Francisco-based business that
helps Bay Area seniors sign up for Medicare plans.
Read more of this article. Learn more about Medicare.
Posted on December 27, 2006 by Jason
Wall Street Journal, December 27th, 2006
A reverse mortgage could help you pay for retirement – or it could cost you and
your heirs a lot of money.
The housing boom of recent years has fueled
record growth in these products, which give homeowners an income stream they
don’t have to repay until they sell their home or die. But reverse mortgages
have long been weighed down by high costs and complexities. Now, they’re coming
in for a makeover that may save consumers thousands of dollars.
Sensing
growth opportunities as baby boomers retire, financial-services firms such as
IndyMac Bancorp Inc. and the privately held Seattle Mortgage Co. have been
cutting the costs of reverse mortgages and offering special deals. Now, big
national lenders are eyeing the market: Bank of America Corp. recently waded
into reverse mortgages with a pilot project in Phoenix, though it won’t say when
it plans to roll out the program nationally. Countrywide Financial Corp. says it
expects to launch a new reverse mortgage in 2007. The competition from both is
expected to put further downward pressure on costs.
The federal government, meanwhile, is trying to push down costs as well. The
Department of Housing and Urban Development, which insures most reverse
mortgages, is looking into lowering the origination costs and mortgage-insurance
premiums that homeowners pay, according to HUD officials. At the same time,
Ginnie Mae, a federal housing-finance agency, announced in October that, for the
first time, it will begin packaging reverse mortgages for sale on Wall Street.
Ginnie Mae’s move is widely expected to lower interest rates that consumers pay,
since studies have shown that the agency’s guarantees in the traditional
mortgage market lower rates by between 0.5 percent and 0.8 percent.
Read more of this article. Learn more about Reverse Mortgages.
Posted on December 15, 2006 by Jason
Star-Telegram.com, December 14th, 2006
We all depend, sooner or later, on breakthrough drugs, the product
of hundreds of millions of dollars of investment in research and
development. They are powerful weapons against disease.
But sometimes, after investing huge amounts of money and enlisting
the best efforts of brilliant research scientists, the companies making
these drugs fail.
Earlier this month, after investing more than $800 million in trying
to develop a blockbuster drug to combat heart disease, Pfizer Inc.
stopped work on torcetrapib. The reason: Some participants in the
clinical trials died of complications. Pfizer scientists had hoped that
this new experimental drug would be a powerful treatment to lower the
risk of heart attack and stroke. The good news: The scientists are
working to discover what went wrong.
Investment in R&D is the lifeblood of America’s pharmaceutical
industry. Our expectations are well-founded on the performance of
America’s scientific talent — and the willingness of investors to take
the necessary risks.
Read more of this article.
Posted on December 15, 2006 by Jason
The New York Times, December 12th, 2006
Marvin Margolis, an 80-year-old Manhattan financial consultant, is looking for investors willing to bet on when he will die.
Two years ago, Mr. Margolis bought a large life insurance policy.
Now, he’s considering selling it to a group of investors, a deal that
should give him as much as $2 million to enjoy in his final years. In
return, the investors will get the policy’s $7 million payout when he
dies — which they hope will be soon, so they can stop paying his
premiums.
“This is a wonderful opportunity to use my body as an
asset,” Mr. Margolis said. “I deserve to be able to benefit in some way
from my age.”
Trading in life insurance policies held by wealthy
seniors has quietly become a big business. Hedge funds, financial
institutions like Credit Suisse and Deutsche Bank, and investors like Warren E. Buffett
are spending billions to buy life insurance policies from the elderly.
Other investors are paying seniors to apply for life insurance, lending
them money to buy the policies, and then reselling them to speculators.
This nascent market illustrates one way that investors are hoping to
make money from a large and wealthy generation of Americans as they
reach retirement age. These aging baby boomers and those even older
offer both opportunities and risks for many companies, investors and
swindlers seeking to capitalize on their final years.
Read more of this article. Learn more about Life Settlements.
Posted on December 12, 2006 by Jason
WFAA.com, December 11th, 2006
Jan Gaynor and
Barbara Cohn have decided to spend their retirement years in this city
of art and culture, not just because it’s steeped in 400 years of
history, but also because it offers something new.
The
sixtysomething couple wanted to live in the nation’s first full-fledged
retirement community for gays and lesbians. They sold their house in
California and moved into a condominium at Rainbow Vision Santa Fe this
summer.
“We’ve been together for 16 years, and we were
looking to retire someplace where we could be ourselves,” Ms. Cohn
said. “Here, we can hold hands and give each other a kiss without
someone raising an eyebrow.”
Since Rainbow Vision opened
in June, 60 people from across the country have bought or leased
residences and settled into what’s been billed as a resort community
for those who want to make the most of the second half of life.
Read more of this article.
Posted on December 12, 2006 by Jason
Los Angeles Times, December 10th, 2006
Jim Elliott, 55, spends his days clambering onto the tops of houses,
taking measurements for the wooden trusses his company sells to support
roofs through long, snowy winters.
Not long ago, Elliott thought his ladder-climbing days would soon be
over. With a few more years of work, his 401(k) account would be large
enough to let him retire at 60 and spend his days with his three
grandchildren.
Then Elliott learned that his former employer had looted the company’s
401(k) plan. The $230,000 he had saved over three decades was gone.
A government-appointed trustee is trying to recover the money, but
workers have been told they can expect to get back perhaps half what
they lost.
“I’m going to be up measuring roofs when I’m 75 years old,” said
Elliott, a husky man with steel-gray hair. “I didn’t do a lot of things
over the years because I was trying to save for retirement. Now I see I
was paying for somebody else’s vacations.”
If Elliott had a traditional pension, his retirement checks would be
guaranteed under a federally backed insurance plan. But no comparable
protection exists for 401(k)s, even though they are rapidly replacing
pensions as the financial backbone of retirement for most Americans.
Read more of this article.
Posted on December 11, 2006 by Jason
SpokesmanReview.com, December 10th, 2006
Annuities are big business in Washington.
Insurance companies
sold annuity contracts worth about $3.6 billion in 2004, according the
most recent available government statistics and private research.
High
numbers of affluent retirees in the state, along with fresh memories of
an unpredictable stock market, make annuities an attractive choice for
people who want to make sure they have a steady, predictable income no
matter how long they live.
“The people in Washington are right in
line with what others are doing, partly because of wealth and
awareness,” said Michael Vaughan of J.G. Wentworth, a finance company
in Bryn Mawr, Pa.
Annuities sales in Idaho reached about $500 million in 2004.
On a national scale, Americans have about $2 trillion in annuity assets, making them a potent part of retirement planning.
Yet
annuity contracts are not for everyone. They can be misused by
unscrupulous salespeople and companies eager to collect fees, say
federal and state regulators.
Before buying an annuity, investors
should learn a few things about how the contracts work and ask
themselves some important questions, the first of which should be,
“Why?”
Read more of this article.
Posted on December 11, 2006 by Jason
Examiner.com, December 9th, 2006
For local retiree Tom Cosgrove, the real work has just begun.
Cosgrove
volunteers with the Ignatian Volunteer Corps of Baltimore, an
organization that provides volunteer work for men and women over age 50.
Cosgrove,
who worked as an executive for AT&T, volunteers on Wednesdays and
Fridays at the Arc of Baltimore’s Rutherford Day Center. The Arc offers
a variety of programs and services for adults with mental retardation.
“I just like going and being with the clients of Arc. They are so honest,” Cosgrove said.
“A
few weeks ago, one of [my clients] came in and gave me a sheet of paper
on which was typed something to the effect of ‘Mr. Tom is a nice man,
he takes us walking, he reads us books and he helps us a lot. I like
Mr. Tom,’ ” Cosgrove said. “One of the programs that Arc has is to
expose them to computers, so he had been learning to type and gave it
to me. It just about took my breath away.”
Cosgrove said that one
of the most beneficial aspects of working through IVC is the
spiritual-reflection program. Members can meet with an individual
counselor or with a group to discuss the spiritual aspects of the time
spent volunteering.
“We get a lot of volunteers based on the
uniqueness that the volunteering is partnered with the reflection,”
said Bill Macsherry, IVC Baltimore’s regional director.
Read more of this article.
Posted on December 8, 2006 by Jason
Best Syndication, December 8th, 2006
With a vision to provide a universal health plan, such as Medicare,
the United States does not truly have a national health care plan. Even
though universal health care, another name for national health care
plans, has its conception in the 20th century, the United States has
shied away from its inception. In fact, the United States is one of the
few industrialized countries that do not offer true, government
provided universal health care.
The first private health insurance programs created nation wide was
the Blue Cross plans. Originally paid by individuals on prepaid bases
for certain hospitals, this was later changed to include any sponsored
hospital. The individual would provide a monthly payment that ensured
he was cared for a specified number of days.
The Blue Shield plan was another plan created during the 1940s. It
allowed the prepayment for doctor services. The plan’s creation
provided an alternative to a national health care plan. The Blue Shield
and Blue Cross plans eventually merged, forming what we call today Blue
Cross Blue Shield.
There are varying reasons that a national health care insurance plan
has not taken hold in the United States. As the American Medical
Association has opposed the establishment of a national plan, the
employer sponsored insurance plan has added the catalyst to not create
a national plan. Since the employers can write off the plans provided
to their employees, Congress has not received any push to change the
concept of employer-sponsored plans.
The closest conception of universal health care the United States institutionalized is Medicare. Medicare was created in 1965.
Read more of this article.
Posted on December 7, 2006 by Jason
SeniorJournal.com, December 7th, 2006
Sleep is essential to
well-being, quality of life and overall health, especially among the
older population according to the new report The Role of Sleep In
Healthy Aging, published by the International Longevity Center-USA.
The organization also offers some things senior citizens can do, and
should not do, to get a good nights sleep.
“The prevalence of sleep-related problems increases
with age”, says Dr. Harrison Bloom, coauthor of the report and senior
associate with the ILC-USA. “A common misconception is that older
individuals require less sleep and older people themselves believe they
need less sleep than younger people.”
Many clinicians are unaware of the serious
conditions associated with insomnia in older adults, says the report.
Older adults with sleep-related problems are more likely to be
depressed, suffer attention and memory problems, experience daytime
sleepiness and are at higher risk of falls than those who have good
quality of sleep.
If older adults suffer from insomnia, a thorough
medical evaluation may be necessary.
The ILC-USA also recommends the following tips for
healthful sleep hygiene:
Read more of this article.
