Bureaucracy, Paperwork Block Access to Government Aid
Squared Away Blog
by Kimberly Blanton
15h ago
Seven million low-income Americans who would qualify for SNAP food stamps are not receiving them. And millions have fallen out of their state’s Medicaid coverage or Children’s Health Insurance Program since the federal guarantee of coverage during COVID expired last year.   The bureaucratic hurdles, multiple-page applications, and layers of federal and state requirements cause many eligible people to give up on applying or, if they apply, to be rejected by government safety net programs for incomplete or improper applications. “It can feel like a full-time job getting on those progra ..read more
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Small Business Retirement Plans: How Firms Perceive Benefits & Costs
Squared Away Blog
by Anqi Chen
15h ago
The brief’s key findings are: Our 2023 Small Business Retirement Survey looks at why some small firms offer a retirement savings plan and others do not. Factors that affect whether small firms offer a plan include firm size, wages, and industry, as well as beliefs on whether it will help attract workers. The main barriers to offering a plan are concerns about the stability/size of the firm and the perceived costs of a plan. Concerns about costs are driven by misperceptions; many firms are unaware of lower-cost options for employers and tax credits. The results also suggest tha ..read more
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Nursing Homes Can’t Meet the Care Needs of an Aging Population
Squared Away Blog
by Alicia H. Munnell
3d ago
Where are we going to get the workers to care for us?  How are we going to pay them?  In my view, long-term care is one of the major challenges facing an aging society.  Care can take the form of a nursing home, formal care provided in the community or home, or informal care provided by family or friends.  KFF recently released a really nice summary of the state of play on the nursing home front in the process of describing a proposed rule that would create new staffing requirements. Nobody really wants to go to a nursing home, and the long-standing staffing issues combined ..read more
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Nursing Homes Forced to Hire More Costly Outside Staff
Squared Away Blog
by Kimberly Blanton
5d ago
COVID has wreaked havoc on the nursing home industry’s staffing. Prior to COVID, only one in five nursing homes had to hire some of their workers from outside agencies to fill in as caregivers for their patients. Today, nearly half are using agency staff, who are providing more and more hours of the direct care that these high-need patients require, according to research in the March issue of the journal Health Affairs. Hiring agency staff is more expensive than employing people in-house, and the growing use of them has created numerous problems for nursing homes and potentially their patients ..read more
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In COVID Year 2, Older Workers Faced Tough Choices
Squared Away Blog
by Kimberly Blanton
1w ago
The first year of the pandemic, a period of great uncertainty, was even more fraught for older workers, who were at higher risk of serious illness or death if they contracted the virus. The second year brought more uncertainty. Older Americans were embracing the new vaccine as variants of the virus continued to evolve. Unemployment, after spiking at nearly 15 percent the previous year, was coming back down. In September, the generous cash assistance approved in Congress that had kept many Americans afloat expired. Despite the job market recovery in Year 2 of COVID – April 2021 through March 20 ..read more
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A Major Risk Facing Older Americans: The Need for Long-Term Care
Squared Away Blog
by Alicia H. Munnell
1w ago
Private long-term care insurance is unlikely to be part of the solution. One of the greatest health-related risks facing older people is the cost of extensive long-term care to help with activities of daily living such as bathing, dressing, and eating or to deal with dementia or other chronic conditions.     We estimate that roughly one-fifth of 65-year-olds will never require long-term care, while about one-quarter will have severe needs (see white and red shading in Table 1).  In between these two extremes, 22 percent will experience minimal needs (gray shading) and 38 pe ..read more
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Homeownership in Retirement: an Asset or a Burden?
Squared Away Blog
by Kimberly Blanton
2w ago
The conventional wisdom for older workers heading into retirement is that owning a house is a good thing. The property has no doubt appreciated over many years, adding to their wealth.  But new research finds that homeowners often strain to a pay a mortgage that is larger than what they can realistically afford. The essence of the problem for retirees, who usually rely on savings to help with living expenses, is that many do not have enough to make their monthly payments comfortably. This problem has become more pressing over the years. Half of the retired homeowners who were born in the ..read more
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Can a Nudge Reduce Credit Card Debt?
Squared Away Blog
by Alicia H. Munnell
2w ago
Results from large scale experiment in the UK say “no.” Our recent study about debt holdings of older Americans focused our attention on how credit card debt could get people in trouble.  We, like other observers, bemoaned people’s tendency to pay the minimum required amount, and, like other observers, blamed these minimum payments on the prominence of this option on the credit card company’s billing statement.  If the full amount due came first and the minimum required payment appeared in a secondary slot, we were sure that many more people would increase their payments.  In sh ..read more
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Caregivers Share their Stresses and Joys
Squared Away Blog
by Kimberly Blanton
2w ago
Jacquelyn had finally snared her dream job as an assistant to a television writer in New York City. Riding the subway one Saturday night, she got a call that changed all that. Her mother, who was living with her grandmother, was in trouble back home. Jacquelyn returned to find rotting food in the refrigerator and a house on the brink of foreclosure for past due mortgage payments. Her mother had Alzheimer’s disease. Jacquelyn said she had to quit her job and never returned to New York. “Caregiving requires a restructuring of who you are,” she said. Undervalued, stressed, exhausted, guilty and e ..read more
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Can Employer Demand Support Older Workers Today…And Tomorrow?
Squared Away Blog
by Geoffrey T. Sanzenbacher
2w ago
The brief’s key findings are: Many older workers are inclined to work longer, but will employers hire and retain them – today and in the future? A series of CRR studies on this topic provide a case for tempered optimism. First, hard data suggest that older workers are at least as productive as younger ones, though they do cost more. Second, survey data show that employers’ views are largely in line with these hard data, and job postings confirm a willingness to hire. Finally, while the jobs that older workers do today may be less prevalent in the future, jobs that they have the ski ..read more
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