Agenda argentum biography

By Thomas Gresham

Is ageism the reason it’s so tough to get policy and legislation for older people onto the political agenda?

Do politicians understand what matters to older adults?
If you want to understand why progress on crucial issues related to aging seems slow and elusive in today’s policy climate, you may have to travel back more than 50 years to when a series of milestone pieces of legislation radically improved conditions for many older adults.

That’s where Brian Kaskie’s thoughts go.

Kaskie, an associate professor of health management and policy at the University of Iowa, points to the 1960s, when the United States expanded the Social Security System, passed the Older Americans Act, and created Medicare and Medicaid.

At the time, Kaskie says, the problems faced by an aging population were pervasive and relatively uniform, such as insufficient retirement savings and poor health care coverage.

Those transformative fed