A Few from the NY Times

I found two interesting pieces on the Times this morning.  The first, courtesy of the AP, situates the recent Democrat-Republican spats over who deserves the highly valued elderly voting block.  Democrats seem exasperated. They're the ones who invented Medicare and other major entitlement programs, but they are now playing catch-up as seniors increasingly doubt Obama's health-care initiatives. What kind of ground are the Republicans--who have pushed for major cuts in Medicare in the past, even suggesting that it could be phased out--standing on here?  Maybe it's the way they harness a "contractive" and a "bill-of-rights" kind of language that allows them to appear as earnest defenders of senior citizens.

The other, unrelated piece deals with the emergence of geriatric care managers; these individuals can save a family a good deal of time and effort by serving as a kind of mediator both between siblings as they try to take care of aging relatives, and between those siblings and the individual in need of care themselves.  A geriatric care manager is a voice of authority and reason, directing what is an enormously taxing process--both financially and emotionally.  These are precisely the kinds of positions that I think will experience huge growth over the next few decades as the boomers launch into retirement.