Consumer Focus: “Over My Dead Body”

Katie Sloan

We baby boomers have strong feelings about the things we swear we will never do as we age. Move into a nursing home? “Over my dead body,” we exclaim. Become dependent on our children? No way. Let someone else decide how we are going to age? Not going to happen. These are only a few of the things we don’t want to be part of our aging experience.

But what do we want? What would it take to make our aging process something we take pleasure in, rather than something we dread?

Dan Reingold, CEO of the Hebrew Home for the Aged in New York City, posed this provocative question to his closest friends a few years ago. In return, he got some great ideas about how long-term services and supports will have to change before the boomers arrive. Dan’s question and his friends’ responses are featured in a new report by AAHSA’s Cabinet on Future Needs of Consumers called “Who Decides?”

The report presents strategies to help providers of long-term services and supports develop a new relationship with the baby boomers who will be aging over the next few decades.

The main theme of the report won’t surprise you. Baby boomers want to take charge of their own aging experience. They won’t trust providers to make decisions for them. And they’ll expect abundant choices in the services available to them as they age. The cabinet strongly recommends that, like Dan Reingold, providers start asking consumers important questions about how they want to age – and then begin creating programs and services that meet those preferences.

I hope you’ll read the report – or its Executive Summary, if you’re pressed for time. Then come back here and tell us what you think. Do the recommendations ring true for you? Are there topics that you’d like us to discuss further? And – most important – how does our current system of long-term services and supports need to change so you won’t say, “Over my dead body!?!”