Do wealthier people really live longer than everyone else? If so, why? The research indicates a clear connection between wealth and health. Wealthier people tend to live longer, healthier lives than poorer people. Is it the wealth that makes people healthier? Or do the traits that are likely to increase wealth also contribute to better health? The article quotes Dr. George Valliant, an expert I’ve cited in past issues of Retirement Watch, and his conclusions make the most sense to me. Valliant says the research indicates first that behavior is the major factor in longevity. Avoid excess drinking, smoking, and weight gain, and you’re likely to live longer. Valliant believes that people with higher education tend to be more future-oriented, so they’re also less likely to engage in those bad habits. Beyond that, satisfying relationships and engagement with others are major contributors to longevity and good health.
But for Vaillant, the answer is much simpler. “Those wonderful pills that are marketed to let you live forever—those things just don’t seem to be terribly important,” he says. Instead, it’s making bigger behavioral choices, such as avoiding drinking too much and nurturing a stable marriage, that let people prolong their lives. And as for what makes people happy in old age, Vaillant says it has more to do with strong, loving relationships than anything for sale at a store. Says Vaillant, “I’m 77, and what I enjoy most are my grandchildren.”
Medicare pays about half the medical expenses of the average beneficiary. But most people, especially those planning for retirement, have grave misunderstandings about the program and what it covers, according to a recent survey. For example, they don’t know if it covers long-term care and the amount of premiums they’re likely to pay for their coverage. A higher percentage of retirees report paying more for medical expenses than they thought they would. About a quarter of pre-retirement Americans admit to having little or no knowledge of Medicare and how much their retirement medical costs are likely to be.
For recent estimates of how much you’re likely to need, on average, for retirement medical care check here.
There’s a difference between aging and getting older, according to octagenarian doctor, researcher, and Stanford University professor Walter Bortz. The goal should be not only to live longer but to have a higher quality of life. Bortz says most people fail in this goal because their bodies age from disuse. Lack of activity leads to many of the diseases and conditions we associates with aging. Bortz recommends four steps to staying younger longer: Move more, own your self care, stay engaged with life, and don’t fall for anti-aging hoaxes.
After age 50, you can’t afford to be sedentary. “Exercise for young people is optional,” he says. “Exercise for old people is an imperative.”
What exactly should you do? Any number of things: Walk, run, swim, row, bike or dance. Even sex counts, he says, “if you do it right.” That means getting your heart rate up three times a week for at least a half hour each time. Golf can be good for you, too, provided you ditch the cart and walk.
As you age, your legs become your most important organs, Bortz says. Doing balance exercises also helps you maintain the ability to continue walking into old age.
Retirees and employees of Kodak are likely to receive bad news in the near future. The firm filed for bankruptcy reorganization, and as part of that process it’s likely to decide eliminate their plans for retiree health care expenses. Companies don’t need to file for bankruptcy protection to do that, and many firms routinely reduced their support for retiree medical expenses over the years.
But when a firm files for bankruptcy, those hurt by elimination of retiree medical plans can take advantage of a special tax benefit. This helps them pay for new medical insurance, and some insurer offer plans geared to those who lost their retiree benefits and are using the tax benefit.
Still, retirees of companies in bankruptcy protection have an option unavailable to retirees of companies that are healthy but eliminate retiree health coverage anyway: the Health Coverage Tax Credit, or HCTC, a federally funded program administered by the Internal Revenue Service.
The credit pays a portion—currently 72.5%—of health-insurance premiums for retirees whose benefits have been reduced or eliminated in bankruptcy proceedings and whose pensions are taken over by the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp., the federal insurer that assumes control of failed plans and pays the benefits.
The program will pay for comprehensive major medical coverage, including prescription drugs and dental and vision care, if they are included in that coverage.
There’s a of research on how to have a happy and successful retirement. Most of it these days reaches similar conclusions. You need to be active physically, mentally, and socially. You need relationships with people, some structure to your life, and things to keep you busy. A new study from the Sloan Center on Aging & Work at Boston College takes the research a step further. The study found that the older people with the highest well-being are those who are highly engaged in their activities. It doesn’t matter what the activities are. They could be work, caregiving, volunteering, education, or anything else. What matters is that it is something you care about and are enthusiastic about.
Furthermore, the study found that overall well-being among older adults appears to be considerably higher among those who are engaged in these activities. Older adults who reported being involved in one of these four activities, but not engaged, had well-being scores no higher than those who were uninvolved. Nevertheless, those reporting high or moderate levels of engagement also showed high levels of well-being. This difference was widest in the 65-and-older age group, suggesting that the quality of one’s experience with paid work, caregiving, education and volunteering may be particularly consequential for the well-being of people in later life.
Larger businesses have been doing well since the economy’s bottom in 2009 and have been hiring at a reasonable clip. But employment overall still is weak, and small businesses seem to be the reason. They aren’t hiring, and surveys by the NFIB indicate they don’t plan to hire anytime soon. It’s been assumed that this is partly an effect of the financial crisis and partly because small businesses are more dependent on housing.
But what if there’s another reason? What if small businesses aren’t hiring because their money is paying for higher employee medical care expenses for employees? That’s the argument here. Scott Shane of Case Western Reserve University says he’s looked at the data and that hiring by new businesses has been declining since 1999. He pins the cause on the cost of providing medical coverage to employees.
The slide in job creation appears linked to the rising cost of employee benefits. As the cost of providing for employees’ health care and retirement increases, hiring people becomes more expensive. The cost of employee benefits has been rising faster than businesses’ revenues since at least 2000. The BLS reports that from 2001 to 2010 the cost of employee benefits at private businesses rose faster than inflation, going up 13.6 percent in inflation-adjusted terms. The increase in benefit costs over the past decade suggests that benefit costs are eating into companies’ profits.
EQUIPMENT OVER LABOR
It is only natural that entrepreneurs try to reduce those costs. One way to do that is to hire fewer people. Equipment doesn’t need health insurance or retirement plans. So if a business can produce the same results by substituting investment in equipment for investment in labor, it can solve the rising benefit cost problem, albeit at the expense of employment. Therefore it’s not surprising that a smaller fraction of entrepreneurs hires employees, and those who do hire fewer people than they once did. The profit motive demands it.
He says the solution is to contain medical expenses. But the health care overhaul enacted in 2010 doesn’t do that, and some studies say it increases costs.
Many people search for the way to work most efficiently and get the most done. Even retired people have various projects and hobbies they work on and wouldn’t mind being more efficient at. I stumbled upon some research into how to become more efficient and productive at almost any activity. You can read about it here and here. The basic approach is to work intensely for 90 minutes, and then take a substantial break. Then repeat the process. Don’t try to do this more than three times in a day. You don’t improve efficiency or productivity by working longer hours, and you probably reduce quality by working longer.
The way we’re working isn’t working–for employees or for their employers. There is a better way to fuel productivity and high performance. The first key to changing the way we work is recognizing that the value of those you manage isn’t generated by the number of hours they work, but rather by how much value they produce during the hours we are working. Working longer hours, juggling more tasks and answering more emails isn’t the solution.
As every great athlete understands, the highest performance occurs when we balance work and effort with rest and renewal. The human body is hard-wired to pulse, and requires renewal at regular intervals not just physically, but also mentally and emotionally.
Unfortunately, rest and renewal get no respect in the organizational world. Instead, most managers instinctively view those who seem to need time for rest and renewal as slackers.
In case you haven’t seen this (the most-viewed item on The Wall Street Journal online on New Year’s Day) (subscription might be required), you’ll probably want to read it. It’s an excerpt from a new book by a surgeon providing unusually candid commentary on what surgeons think and do. It covers things such as why obese people are bad surgical patients, what a surgeon’s thinking during an operation at different times, and the economics of the profession.
Like poker players and their cards, surgeons are sometimes only as good as the patients they are dealt. Obesity, excessive scar tissue from a previous surgery in the same area, disease that is more advanced than anticipated—any one of these physiological conditions creates more work and a more difficult environment for the surgeon.
Even before the surgery begins, underlying or chronic conditions such as a history of hypertension, cardiac disease or lung disease put patients at risk for complications. Today, based on your medical history, surgeons can usually analyze, quite accurately, your risk of complications (or death) before setting foot in the operating room. All you have to do is ask.
Most people think of hospice care as a nonprofit program offered to help the terminally ill through their last days. In fact, it’s a big business filled with all sorts of aggressive sales tactics, bonuses, referrals fees, potential conflicts of interest, and regular targets or goals for employees. Bloomberg has a revealing report on this small but rapidly-growing sector of the medical world.
Hospice care, once chiefly a charitable cause, has become a growth industry, with $14 billion in revenues, 1,800 for-profit providers and a base of Medicare-covered patients that doubled to 1.1 million from 2000 to 2009.
Compensation based on enrollment numbers, pay to nursing- home doctors who double as hospice medical directors, and gifts to the nursing facilities have helped fuel the boom, according to an examination of 1,000 pages of court documents and interviews with more than 45 current and former hospice employees, patients and family members.
The business changed quite a bit after Medicare began reimbursements for it and publicly-traded companies entered the market. The piece on Bloomberg gives you a lot of information to digest if a loved one is being referred to hospice and ideas for questions to ask before choosing a hospice.
Vitas paid salespeople bonuses based on patients’ length of stay, according to White, who worked for the company in Cathedral City, California, from 1998 to 2004. Medicare, which foots 90 percent of the national hospice bill, compensates providers on a per-diem basis, and lengthier stays increase profitability, federal data show.
Your IQ changes over time. Scientists now think they can identify the factors that trigger the changes. This especially important to people in the second part of life who want to stay mentally agile and even increase their mental acuity. While some studies show that problem-solving skills peak around age 53, that’s not the case for everyone and maybe it doesn’t have to happen. Read the WSJ article. (Subscription might be required.)
There are practical steps people can take to see longer-term IQ changes. A 30-year study at the National Institute of Mental Health found that people whose work involves complex relationships, setting up elaborate systems or dealing with people or difficult problems, tend to perform better over time on cognitive tests. Test scores of people whose jobs are simple and require little thought actually tend to decline, according to the research, published in 1999 in Psychology and Aging.
New tasks stimulate the brain most. When researchers at the University of Hamburg subjected 20 young adults to one month of intense training in juggling, they found an increase in the corresponding gray matter in the brain as early as seven days after the training began. The added gray matter receded when the training was stopped, although the participants were still able to juggle, says the study, published in 2008 in PLoS One.
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