Story by Chris Graham
Paul Lavigne is one of these baby boomers on the verge of wreaking havoc on the senior-services system as he ages into senior status, at least theoretically speaking. But at 61, Lavigne isn’t ready for the rocking chair on the front porch of the old-folks’ home just yet.
Lavigne, to the contrary, went out and bought a racquetball racket earlier this year, and though he hasn’t started playing regularly, the racket has him at the Waynesboro Family YMCA a few days a week getting in shape for his eventual return to the court.
“I’m still 15, 20 years away from needing to worry about services,” said Lavigne, whose day job has him heading up as executive director the Valley Program for Aging Services, which coordinates services and programs for seniors in a five-county, five-city region of the Shenandoah Valley.
And Lavigne is thinking that he and other boomers won’t exactly welcome with open arms the idea that they need to think about moving into an assisted-living facility or having Meals on Wheels add them to the route or that kind of thing.
“We’re the Woodstock generation,” said Lavigne, referring to the 40th anniversary of the seminal 1969 upstate New York music festival that defined the ’60s generation. “We expect to be playing racquetball. We expect to be working out at the Y. We expect to remain active into our 70s and our 80s.”
The question that raises from a policy perspective, to Lavigne’s reckoning: “Are boomers going to have the same demand on health and human services as we think?”
I didn’t expect that to be the issue when I dove into the topic regarding the aging boomer population and what its impact might be on the senior-service sector over the course of the next 10, 15, 20, 25 years. What I’d thought I would hear over and over and over again in talking with people in the senior-issues set were assorted fears and loathings over how the numbers associated with aging boomers and the available senior-services infrastructure just weren’t adding up.
What I got back was some bad news and good news. The bad news, if you can call it that, locally is that the Valley is proving to be a popular retirement destination, “people on their way to Florida who stop here for a night and decide they want to move here,” as Cathie Galvin, the program director for the Valley Program for Aging Services in Harrisonburg-Rockingham, described it.
So not only, then, are we seeing our indigenous senior population growing, on order of 16 percent in Harrisonburg-Rockingham over the past decade, according to Census projections, with the numbers similar throughout the Valley, but we’re getting new seniors here literally every day.
“And they bring with them in terms of expectations as far as services goes what they’ve become accustomed to where they’ve come from,” said Dave Metz, a member of Staunton City Council and boomer himself, who at 60 lives in a condo in the renovated Staunton YMCA that he purchased after he and his wife, Debbie, decided to downsize.
Metz told me about a phone call he received a few months ago from a California 80-year-old who was thinking about moving to Staunton, but first wanted to know about public-transportation options and accessibility to doctors’ offices and nearby grocery stores. “People who come from big cities expect to be able to receive the same level of public services when they come to the Valley, but we just can’t compete with what the big cities and metropolitan areas can offer,” Metz said.
The good news, if you can call it good news: Lavigne is not alone in sensing that the demand for services by senior boomers isn’t going to be the same as we’re seeing from the current generation of seniors.
But even the good news isn’t all good news.
“It’s more that they’re going to be a different senior population according to the traditionalist view of seniors,” said Jeanne Russell, the marketing director in the Valley office of Home Instead Senior Care, which provides personalized nonmedical care for seniors.
“The traditionalists were grandma and grandpa who lived through the Depression and didn’t rely on the outside world for anything and don’t spend a dime on anything. The boomers, as they’re becoming seniors, well, their whole lives have been women going back to work, so they paid for child care, they paid for housekeepers. They’re used to using services. They’re used to strangers coming into their house. They have different expectations. And they’re struggling to take care of their parents, and they don’t want to do that to their kids. So their mindset is very different. As a generation, it’s going to be different,” Russell said.
“Folks who are in their 70s and 80s and 90s now come with a mindset of, You take care of yourself, you don’t whine or cry or complain about anything. You certainly don’t ask for help,” said Sue Friedman, the president and CEO of the Alzheimer’s Association of Central and Western Virginia, which provides programs and services for Alzheimer’s patients and their families and caregivers.
“You flip that now to the baby boomers. The baby boomers are now about, We want to know more, where can I get this, what can you tell me, how can you help me, I want everything you’ve got to offer. So it’s going to be a real shift. Instead of having to push our services out, people are going to start coming to us. We know that. We’re prepared for a shift in the kind of demand that we have for our services,” Friedman said.
Are you picking up on the vibe here? It’s not necessarily the case that the boomer senior tsunami is going to overload the senior-services infrastructure with millions of people flocking to assisted-living facilities. But in a way it might be easier to prepare for that than what we seem to actually be facing, which is a tidal wave of boomers who we know won’t want to go the assisted-living route, but otherwise, we really have no idea what they’re going to expect or demand.
“There are so many shifts in even family structures that makes it hard for anybody to get a handle on things,” said Melissa Crocker, the chair of the Waynesboro Senior Advocacy Commission, a volunteer advisory body for the City Council in Waynesboro on senior issues.
“The people who are baby boomers now are more likely to be living alone into older adulthood because of divorce or because they had no children or their children live 500 miles away. Right now such a huge proportion of caregiving is provided by family members, but that’s not going to be there down the road. So that puts more strain on home-health agencies. And with so many people being economically deprived, who’s going to pay the home-health agencies?” Crocker said.
And more from Jeanne Russell: “When you poll, you find that 85 percent of them want to stay in their own homes as long as possible. Have they taken the steps to ensure that will happen? Very few have done that. How accessible is their house? That’s a first question. Stairs, doorways, where you park, where things are,” Russell said.
“Long-term care insurance – there are statistics that say that 50 percent of the population will be incapacitated at some point in their life. That means you need someone to take care of you. Do you have your medical and financial power of attorney worked out ahead of time?” Russell said.
“Transportation is a huge issue,” Russell said. “We’re going to have a lot of older drivers on the road. Maybe some of them shouldn’t be driving. The ones who can’t drive, they still need to be able to get around, and we don’t have the kinds of services here that they have in bigger cities. Waynesboro has some things ongoing that are getting ahead of the curve, but it’s not like you can just step outside and catch the Metro, and you can be anywhere.
“Where you see seniors already 20 to 25 percent of a local population, you see changes just driving down the street. These places are making their signage bigger, different, their lighting, different. Easier for seniors,” Russell said.
Road signs you can do by working the new, easier-to-read signs into the regular replacement schedule. The long-term insurance issue is going to be expensive; the accessibility issues at home maybe more so.
“That’s going to be a really interesting challenge given the disaster in the real-estate market right now,” Dave Metz said. “A significant portion of the people 70-plus are living in homes that few people want anymore. We’ve downsized our families. Most people today have one or two kids, so they don’t have a need for a house that can accommodate six kids. So there’s far more inventory of big houses than there are big families. And so you’re seeing these houses that a couple of years ago were worth $400,000, and today you can’t get $300,000 for them.”
Which means less equity to borrow against if you want to stay home and make improvements, and less to put into a condo at the old Staunton Y or at the new Bentley Commons, a 108-apartment independent-living facility in Staunton that will be adding to its service offerings a sort of a la carte menu of care options for residents who want to maintain their indepedence as long as they can.
“We’re looking at their concerns of being able to age in place and not having to go into residential communities. What we’re in the process of getting ready to announce soon is something called private-care management, where you pay for services that you need, and you don’t need to go somewhere and pay for services that you don’t need. Residents will be able to use those services here and will be able to stay here,” Bentley Commons executive director Cherie Sims said.
Cathie Galvin with the VPAS office in Harrisonburg-Rockingham is working on a pilot project involving seniors who are eligible for nursing-home placements that is gathering data on costs and benefits to providing them with in-home care.
“We’re going to see more consumer-directed services where we may offer a menu of services, and the consumer will be able to pick and choose what bests suits their needs,” Galvin said.
“That’s going to be the trend in the future – that more services will be portable and delivered at home, and nursing homes will continue to be used primarily for very, very serious, critical kinds of care where nurses have to be there. This is a better way to deliver the care, and it’s where people want to be,” Galvin said.
Where I come down on this, after a month researching the topic – we’re going to have a serious overstock of assisted-living facilities 20 years out, shortages of home-based health-care workers, more costs associated with delivering health-care services at home than in controlled institutional settings where services can be more efficiently delivered, and a strain on the health-care system overall as doctors and hospitals struggle to keep pace with the new demands popping up seemingly daily.
Of course, this is all an educated guess, and Melissa Crocker put in perspective how educated we all are on this right now.
“I don’t think that even the most educated person on this topic can say they know what’s going to happen, to tell you the truth,” Crocker said.
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