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Beware how you age, baby boomers

by Fernando m. Torres-Gil

Every 10 years, the president of the United States calls a White House conference on aging, giving the nation an opportunity to examine how Americans grow old and what might be done to help them. The fifth such seminal event will occur Dec. 11-14 and I am honored to have been chosen by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger as one of his 12 California delegates to the conference. On Nov. 7, we will meet in Sacramento to prepare our plan of action for the conference.

The White House gathering will be the first to focus on baby boomers — those 77 million individuals born between 1946 and 1965 — and their impending retirement. Previous conferences have focused on the needs and desires of the New Deal generation, a relatively smaller cohort of 33 million persons who gave us government programs such as Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, the Older Americans Act and Supplemental Security Income.

President Ronald Reagan sought to use the 1985 conference on aging to roll back these entitlement programs, prompting heated opposition from delegates. It was not until the 1995 conference that President Bill Clinton resisted attempts by the Republican-majority Congress to scale back funding increases for Medicare and Medicaid and for restating support for the programs of the New Deal.

President Bush is taking a different approach. His administration has spent much capital promoting the privatization of Social Security and convincing Americans that Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security are not financially sustainable. This puts the onus on baby boomers to plan and prepare for their own longevity and retirement. The December conference therefore does not include any discussions of Social Security or public policy. Instead, the focus will be on such topics as wellness, healthy behaviors, the role of the market, volunteerism, and social engagement and planning throughout a person’s life. This strategy will present new opportunities but also political and policy dilemmas.

Having been a delegate to the 1971 and 1981 conferences, and overseen the 1995 conference, I have some thoughts on what Bush’s approach might mean. On the one hand, he deserves credit for putting aging on the nation’s agenda and educating baby boomers that they do have a responsibility to plan for a life expectancy approaching 100 years. On the other hand, some serious and complex concerns are not on the conference agenda.

To take just two: What do we do about the dismal saving rates and mushrooming debt — not to mention vanishing safety nets — that will put many baby boomers at financial risk as they get older? And to what extent will biomedical advances and technological innovations influence our physical abilities as we age?

There is little time left to plan rationally for the aging of baby boomers — the first ones will be 60 years old in 2006 and 65 in 2011. The December conference may be the last window of opportunity to debate national policy before this generation realizes what a daunting personal stake they have in the nation’s aging.

Torres-Gil is associate dean of academic affairs at the School of Public Affairs and director of the UCLA Center for Policy Research on Aging. He served as the first-ever assistant secretary of aging in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services during the Clinton administration.