U.S. Assistant Secretary for Aging Helps Promote Medicare Outreach Efforts in South Carolina

(Columbia, S.C.) Normally, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Assistant Secretary for Aging Josefina Carbonell spends her days in the nation's capital advising the President and Congressional leaders and helping shape national policies that affect seniors across the country. But on Monday (October 30) Secretary Carbonell took time out from her busy Washington D.C. schedule to visit South Carolina and join an effort spearheaded by the Lt. Governor's Office on Aging to promote awareness of the upcoming open enrollment for Medicare prescription drug coverage.

The Assistant Secretary heads the Administration on Aging (AoA), the federal agency that implements national aging policies and allocates money to states to provide services mandated under the Older Americans Act. South Carolina currently receives between 25 and 30 million dollars in funding through the agency each year. Carbonell is the longest serving Aging Secretary in the history of the AoA, having been appointed by President Bush in 2001. Secretary Carbonell's time as head of the AoA has seen the passage and implementation of the Medicare Modernization Act, which included the addition of the Part D prescription drug benefit, in 2003, a successful White House Conference on Aging in 2005, and the reauthorization of the Older Americans Act in 2006.

"Many of the programs started under her tenure have had a tremendous impact here in South Carolina," said Lt. Governor André Bauer. "Over the last five years as Assistant Secretary for Aging, she has brought a strategic vision to the Administration on Aging that focuses on the importance of community-based organizations helping adults as they age to maintain their independence and well being in the community, where they overwhelmingly prefer to be."

At a joint press conference attended by representatives from numerous agencies, organizations and drug plan providers involved in reaching out to South Carolina seniors to help them understand the options available during the open enrollment period for Medicare Part D and Medicare Advantage plans, Assistant Secretary Carbonell had positive things to say about the state's efforts to help seniors and their families through the sometimes complicated process of choosing a Medicare prescription drug provider.

"Here in South Carolina, your aging professionals and organizations have worked very hard to be sure that all [Medicare] beneficiaries in your state have the latest information on the important health benefits in Medicare, including the new prescription drug benefit and preventative benefits," said Assistant Secretary Carbonell.

Assistant Secretary Carbonell noted that since the beginning of the Medicare prescription drug plan roll out, well over half a million of South Carolina's 663,000 Medicare beneficiaries now have prescription drug coverage through Medicare.

"This is due in no small part to the efforts of Lt. Governor Bauer and his staff who worked tirelessly for many months - really since the new law was enacted - to make sure that all seniors, as well as their family members, friends and communities, had access to personalized assistance about the program so seniors could improve their health and save money."

A primary focus of the press conference was unveiling the "Special Report for Seniors on Medicare Part D and Other Services," an eight-page tabloid that will be distributed in daily and community newspapers statewide beginning on October 31. Produced by the Lt. Governor's Office on Aging, the Special Report [see article and link below] provides basic information on the new Medicare drug benefit, as well as updates on other programs and initiatives that affect the state's rapidly expanding senior population.

Beginning October 31, newspapers across South Carolina will include a copy of "Special Report for Seniors on Medicare Part D and Other Services. Produced by the Lt. Governor's Office on Aging, the tabloid-style publication provides basic information on the new Medicare drug benefit, as well as updates on other programs and initiatives that affect the state's rapidly expanding senior population.

Most of the state's daily papers will carry the insert on Tuesday (October 31), while papers with a less-than-daily publication schedule will include it according to their next scheduled edition during the week.

Lt. Governor to Hold Joint Press Conference
With Head of U. S. Administration on Aging

(Columbia, S.C.) Lt. Governor André Bauer will welcome U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Assistant Secretary for Aging Josefina Carbonell to Columbia on Monday (October 30) for a joint press conference to announce plans for helping South Carolina’s 663,000 Medicare beneficiaries make informed decisions during the first open enrollment period for the Medicare Part D program, which begins November 15.

The press conference will begin at 11:00 a.m. at the South Carolina Pharmacy Association Office, 1350 Browning Road in Columbia. Lt. Governor Bauer, Office on Aging Director Mike Easterday, Pharmacy Association Executive Vice President Carmello Cinqueonce and leaders of other organizations involved in the Medicare Part D outreach effort will speak at the event.
The Lt. Governor’s Office on Aging’s I-CARE program worked with volunteers from hundreds of agencies, non-profit organizations, community and faith-based groups to provide information to South Carolina Medicare beneficiaries about the new drug benefit during the rollout of the Part D benefit.

Josefina G. Carbonell was appointed by President George W. Bush and confirmed by the Senate as Assistant Secretary for Aging at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) in August 2001. She is the longest serving Assistant Secretary for Aging.
For more information about this event, contact Frank Adams or David Lucas in the Lt. Governor’s Office on Aging.

South Carolina Program Puts State Ahead in Recruiting Fellowship-Trained Geriatric Specialists

Concerns about a shortage of geriatric-trained physicians are growing nationwide, as healthcare experts contemplate the impact of the aging baby boom generation.

An October 18 article in the New York Times outlined some of the challenges involved in encouraging more medical students to enter the field. Having that specialist diagnosing older patients can make a huge difference in indivdual cases, Times reporter Jane Gross wrote in "Geriatrics Lags in Age of High-Tech Medicine"

Margaret Mary Foley, 97, just wasn't herself. Overnight, she stopped eating, went from mildly confused to disoriented, and was unable to urinate. When her panicked family rushed her to the emergency room, doctors did invasive tests, difficult for a woman her age, and then suggested surgery.

But when Mrs. Foley saw a geriatrician at Mount Sinai Medical Center, surgery proved unnecessary. The geriatrician, Dr. Rosanne M. Leipzig, suspected a silent infection - something the other doctors had missed because Mrs. Foley had no fever, as old people rarely do.

Indeed, within days, antibiotics had done the trick. For the Foley family, it was a welcome result. They had reason to count themselves fortunate to have found a doctor who specialized in treating the elderly.

[Read the entire article on the Times web site.]

South Carolina has taken positive steps towards increasing the number of geriatric physicians practicing in the state by adopting legislation promoted by the AARP, the Silver Haired Legislature and the Lt. Governor's Office on Aging that offers help with student loan repayment for fellowship-trained geriatricians that agree to establish practices in the palmetto state. The State Geriatric Loan Repayment Program, was signed into law in 2005 and has begun paying dividends already, with the first class of participants in the program receiving awards in March of 2006.

“We only have 30 geriatricians (currently) to treat the state’s 500,000 patients over 65,” said Lt. Governor André Bauer when he ratified the bill that created the program. “We can now provide incentives for more doctors to undertake an extra year of intense training, thanks to this legislation authored by Rep. Nathan Ballentine and Sen. Ray Cleary.”

The first eight successful applicants to the program received their award notifications in March, and applications for the second round of funding under the program are available now for potential candidates.

To qualify for the program, applicants must be enrolled in, or have recently completed, a fellowship program in geriatric medicine. Successful applicants must agree to establish a practice in South Carolina and stay for at least five years in exchange for up to $35,000 towards repaying student loan debt incurred during their medical school training.

Social Security Administration Announces Increase in 2007 Benefit

Monthly Social Security and Supplemental Security Income benefits for more than 53 million Americans will increase 3.3 percent in 2007, the Social Security Administration announced on October 18.

Social Security and Supplemental Security Income benefits increase automatically each year based on the rise in the Bureau of Labor Statistics' Consumer Price Index for Urban Wage Earners and Clerical Workers (CPI-W), from the third quarter of the prior year to the corresponding period of the current year. This year's increase in the CPI-W was 3.3 percent.

The 3.3 percent Cost-of-Living Adjustment (COLA) will begin with benefits that nearly 49 million Social Security beneficiaries receive in January 2007. Increased payments to more than 7 million Supplemental Security Income beneficiaries will begin on December 29.

Some other changes that take effect in January of each year are based on the increase in average wages. Based on that increase, the maximum amount of earnings subject to the Social Security tax (taxable maximum) will increase to $97,500 from $94,200. Of the estimated 163 million workers who will pay Social Security taxes in 2007, about 11 million will pay higher taxes as a result of the increase in the taxable maximum in 2007.

Medicare and You Handbooks for 2007 Released

On Monday (October 16) the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) announced the availability of the new Medicare and You Handbook for 2007.

CMS is encouraging people with Medicare to review their current coverage this fall to see if it will meet their needs in 2007. Now is the time to help people think about the cost, coverage, and customer service that they need in a plan to get the most out of their Medicare.

Medicare Plan Would Use Part D Claims Information for Research

The federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) announced October 13 that the agency intends to add information collected from beneficiaries in the Part D program about their prescription drug purchases to databases available to federal health agencies and other researchers.

CMS is seeking public input on the plan, which the agency hopes will lead to improvements in the healthcare of seniors and the disabled through the use of outcomes-based reserarch.

“We have seen great improvements in the quality of health care based on identifying opportunities for better care based on Medicare information,” CMS Administrator Mark B. McClellan, M.D., Ph.D., said in a press release issued by the CMS Office of Public Affairs.  “Through the appropriate use of the new prescription drug claims data, we have an unprecedented resource to help us learn more about prescription drug usage by seniors and how we can help seniors get the most benefit from prescription drugs.”

South Carolina is at the cutting edge of outcomes-based research using statistical data to track and monitor the health care outcomes of seniors thanks to our state's Senior Cube database project, a collaboration between the Lt. Governor's Office on Aging, the State Office of Research and Statistics and USC's Arnold School of Public Health funded by a grant from the Duke Endowment.

Last May, Lt. Governor Bauer described potential of the Senior Cube project during his testimnoy before a Congressional Committee debating reauthorization of the federal Older Americans Act.

"I said South Carolina was building for the future by positioning for the senior boom. We believe technology, data and research can allow us to make evidence-based decisions to give us the best results as we invest our scarce tax dollars," Bauer told the House Committee. "South Carolina may be unique in its creation of a senior data cube, which links together large data bases so they may be cross referenced. We are early in this process, and have been helped, as always, by creating partnerships and being alert to private sector and foundation funding. Preliminary conclusions are showing a direct correlation between the intensity of OAA services and the avoidance of hospital ER use and in-patient admissions. "

In August, an agreement was reached with the provider of a new Medicare Advantage - Special Needs plan for South Carolina to include health data gathered from it's patient's in the Senior Cube database. The plan - Care Improvement Plus offered by Baltimore-based XLHealth - is designed especially for Medicare beneficiaries suffering from chronic conditions such as diabetes, congestive heart failure or end stage renal disease and will be available to South Carolinians Medicare beneficiaries beginning on November 15 for 2007.

South Carolina has a high rate of these common chronic diseases among our senior population, and the ability to track the health outcomes of individuals in a managed care program geared specifically towards traeting those illnesses will be a significant addition to the Senior Cube's research potential. Like the data gathered by the federal Medicare project, all of the medical information captured for the Senior Cube is strictly controlled and cannot be used to identify an individual beneficiary. No personal information such as names, addresses or social security numbers is available to researchers using the Cube.

Community Turns Out to Support Santee-Lynches ADIC Grand Opening

The Santee-Lynches Area Agency on Aging held a community celebration and ribbon cutting on Thursday, October 12 to debut their new Aging Disability and Information Center in Sumter.

The event included musical entertainment by local performers, displays by the numerous partnering community organizations involved in the project and comments by ADIC Advisory Committee chairman Stephen Barrineau, Santee Lynches Council of Governments Executive Director James Darby, Bishopville Mayor and COG Chairman Thomas Alexander and Lt. Governor’s Office on Aging Director Mike Easterday. A crowd of several hundred supporters, and partners in the project gathered in front of the Santee Lynches AAA office for the event.

“We are extremely excited about the support and cooperation we have gotten from the Lt. Governor’s Office on Aging,” said Barrineau.

Office on Aging Director Mike Easterday conveyed greetings from Lt. Governor André Bauer to the crowd and spoke about the effort that went into the project at the community level.

“André asked me to send his greetings, and to tell you how much he looks forward to working with this community in the future,” said Easterday. “I know that he would also say that he is proud and humbled to have played a role in bringing about what you have been able to accomplish here. That kind of effort and community collaboration was instrumental in creating this new center where seniors and persons with disabilities can turn to get reliable information about community resources available to assist them in maintaining an independent and healthy lifestyle.”

Santee-Lynches COG Director Jim Darby echoed those sentiments.

“It’s really all about having a vision,” said Darby. “How can we do things better by cooperating with one another?”

The ADIC is a “one-stop-shop” where residents of the four-county area served by Santee Lynches can come to get information and assistance with applying services that will help them remain independent. The Santee-Lynches ADIC will be somewhat unique in that in addition to the bricks and mortar location in the COG coordinated by AAA staffer Gena Kiber, Santee-Lynches will also be using a van provided by the local Transit Authority to take the program directly to rural residents in the AAA’s four-county region. This is vital to the ADIC concepts of promoting one-stop shopping and the “no wrong door” approach to streamlining access to services for consumers who live in rural areas.

Working with its community partners and advisory committee, the ADIC is committed to achieving the following goals:

Operating an effective center that includes streamlined eligibility screening and service application assistance, counseling, personalized referrals and access to prevention and early intervention programs.

• Traveling throughout the four-county service area to bring the ADIC directly to rural communities and assist people not able to visit the Sumter office.
• Providing comprehensive and consumer-friendly information concerning options on available services and benefits that helps people make informed choices.
• Linking individuals who are not eligible for government-funded home and community-based services with private-pay services or other resources.
• Expanding the use of SCACCESS, the online database of services for older adults and individuals with disabilities.

Santee-Lynches AAA launches New ADIC in Sumter

The Santee-Lynches Area Agency on Aging will hold a special event at its Sumter headquarters tomorrow (October 12) to help raise awareness about the new Aging Disability and Information Center (ADIC) that will serve people in Clarendon, Kershaw, Lee and Sumter counties.

ADICs (or ADRCs as they are called by the federal government) are “one-stop-shops” where elderly or disabled individuals in need of services or supports can come to get information and assistance with applying services that will help them remain independent. The center is the second one to open in South Carolina using federal grant funds secured by the Lt. Governor's Office on Aging under President Bush's "New Freedom Initiative."

“Our vision is for all citizens in SC to have an Aging and Disability Information Center that is a highly visible and trusted place where people can turn for information on the full range of long-term support options for senior citizens, adults with disabilities and their families,” said Lt. Governor André Bauer.

The Santee-Lynches ADIC project will include an innovative twist by using a specially equipped van to take the program out into the rural areas of the four-county area and bring the ADIC directly to rural communities to assist people not able to visit the Sumter office.

South Carolina was one of the first states to get involved in this project, using a federal grant in 2004 to open a pilot ADIC in Aiken that serves the Lower Savannah Region of the state.

As this fact sheet from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services explains:

" The Aging and Disability Resource Center Program (ADRC) is a collaborative effort of the Administration on Aging (AoA) and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) designed to streamline access to long-term care. The ADRC initiative supports state efforts to develop “one-stop shop” programs at the community level that will help people make informed decisions about their service and support options and serve as the entry point to the long-term support system. States are using ADRC funds to better coordinate and/or redesign their existing systems of information, assistance and access and are doing so by forming strong state and local partnerships. "

"Mediterranean" Diet May Lower Alzheimer's Risk

Reuters news agency reported today on a just-released study by researchers at New York's Columbia University that found a diet rich in fruits vegetables and olive oil - and low on red meat and dairy products - lowered the risk of Alzheimer's disease in the study's participants.

From the article:

After taking into account other possible risk factors for the disease such as age and how fat or thin the test subjects were, researchers found that those in the top third in terms of how their diets matched the Mediterranean model had 68 percent lower odds of having Alzheimer's disease than those in the bottom one-third. Those in the middle third had 53 percent lower odds.

The study, published in the Archives of Neurology, said there is growing evidence that the Mediterranean diet cuts the risk of stroke, heart disease and diabetes, suggesting that vascular factors may contribute to the chances of developing Alzheimer's.

Read the complete article online at Yahoo! News.

Geriatric Loan Forgiveness Program Applications Available Now

Beginning October 2, applications for the second round of funding under the Geriatric Loan Forgiveness program will be available for potential candidates. To qualify for the program, applicants must be enrolled in, or have recently completed, a fellowship program in geriatric medicine. Successful applicants must agree to establish a practice in South Carolina and stay for at least five years in exchange for up to $35,000 towards repaying student loan debt incurred during their medical school training.

In March, the first round of grant awards were made to the following eight physicians:

• Dr. Jessica Broadway, practicing in the Charleston area
• Dr. Lisa Barr, practicing at Greenville Memorial Hospital
• Dr. Mayes Dubose, practicing in Sumter
• Dr. Bruce Easterling, practicing at the Dorn VA Medical Center in Columbia
• Dr. Vonda Gravely, practicing at the Spartanburg Regional Medical Center
• Dr. William Logan, practicing at the Greenville Memorial Hospital
• Dr. Daniel Meetze, practicing in Spartanburg
• Dr. Donna Ray, practicing at the USC School of Medicine's Department of Internal Medicine in Columbia

For more information or to request an application, contact the Lt. Governor’s Office on Aging by telephone at (803) 734-9900 or by e-mail at askus@aging.sc.gov .

Applications will be accepted through December 15, 2006. Eligible candidates will be contacted by February 1, 2007 to set up an appointment for an interview with the program's advisory board members.