Redefining What Retirement Means

By Rob Johnson, The Roanoke Times, Va.

Jun. 7–As America gets grayer, it needs to be smarter.

That’s the theme that Virginia AARP officials are in Roanoke to promote this weekend, a national platform called "Divided We Fail" that’s focused on improving health care and long-term security.

By 2030, nearly one in four people in the Roanoke and New River valleys will be over 65. But most of them don’t plan to make 65 the traditional retirement age it has long been, said the AARP’s featured speaker, Jeff Goldsmith, at a Friday morning breakfast event. Goldsmith is a futurist that specializes in aging issues.

In fact, 80 percent of the 76 million baby boomers born between 1946 and 1964 plan to work past the age of 75, Goldsmith said. "Boomers will remain taxpayers and part of the active economy far longer than most economists assume. It is likely that millions of boomers will be income-producing assets, not liabilities, on society’s balance sheet well into their 70s and beyond."

Goldsmith is president of Charlottesville-based Health Futures, a company that focuses on corporate planning and forecasting health care trends. In his speech to about 60 people — many of them representing such aging-related businesses as nursing homes — at the Holiday Inn near Tanglewood Mall, Goldsmith plugged his new book, "The Long Baby Boom," published in April.

In both the book and his talk, Goldsmith said that employers, individuals and the government must adjust company insurance plans, the Social Security and Medicare systems and personal savings habits to cope with the financial and health needs of older people.

The need for cooperation between private and public institutions and the graying populace is the essence of the AARP’s "Divided We Fail" campaign, in which the group is partnering with various business trade groups.

They’re pressing the Washington political establishment, including presidential candidates Barack Obama and John McCain, to make concerns about the aging a priority. Both candidates have agreed in principle to the "Divided We Fail" platform, AARP officials said.

There are a total of 42,225 AARP members in the counties of Bedford, Botetourt, Roanoke and Montgomery — and the city of Bedford. The AARP has 1.1 million members in Virginia and 39 million nationally.

The group’s stand states, among other things, that Americans should have choices about long-term health care — allowing them to maintain their independence at home or in their communities, with affordable financing options. Another premise of the current campaign is that workers "should have access to effective retirement plans, and should be able to keep working and contributing to society regardless of age."

Ideas to improve future economic and health care options for seniors are plagued by financial limitations, however. For example, the Social Security Administration’s trustees estimated last year that the program will exhaust its funding by 2041 without an overhaul of current guidelines for retirement qualification and benefit payments. Moreover, the Medicare system for health care benefits to the elderly could go broke by 2018 without financial restructuring, that agency’s trustees have reported.

But Goldsmith said that so many baby boomers are healthier as they approach traditional retirement age that they may ease pressure on Social Security and Medicare by tapping into those benefits later and less often.

If employers can help workers stay on the job longer by offering such benefits as flexible hours, including the option for some of going back and forth between full- and part-time status, nonworking retirement may gradually fade from American society, Goldsmith said.

And if aging boomers are savvy enough to work well past age 65, and adequately lucky to avoid serious illness, history won’t blame them for crushing the country’s retirement safety net under the sheer weight of their numbers, Goldsmith said.

A boomer himself at 59, he joked that by being smart and spry his generation can avoid adding to its "grim list" of cultural bequests he listed: polyester leisure suits, disco music and Starsky and Hutch’s muscle car, the Ford Gran Torino.

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Copyright (c) 2008, The Roanoke Times, Va.

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