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Boomers get their turn at soap box

The once-every-decade White House Conference on Aging, starting Sunday, takes up baby boomers' looming retirement.

By STEPHEN NOHLGREN
Published December 10, 2005

WASHINGTON - Pensions are disappearing. Social Security is heading for shortfalls. Medicare is stumbling toward a complex drug benefit and, don't look now, baby boomers are about to turn 60.

Starting Sunday, hundreds of academics, advocates and just plain citizens will brave snow and plunging temperatures to explore the challenges and opportunities of a graying nation.

They will convene the fifth White House Conference on Aging, a once-a-decade gathering that mixes dry policy planning with outbreaks of political theater.

Delegates can't tell lawmakers what to do. But their collective voice can carry enough bipartisan cachet to redirect how America treats its elders.

In the 1960s, Lyndon Johnson used resolutions from the first White House Conference to ram Medicare and Medicaid through Congress. Ten years later, the second conference came up with Meals on Wheels and congregate dining to battle hunger and isolation.

"It's a cross between moral suasion, a soap box, a bully pulpit and a higher level of advocacy," said Washington consultant Robert Blancato, chairman of the 1995 conference. "Delegates come here with a huge amount of pride. They are really sending a message that this is what this cross section of Americans think needs to be the priority for the next 10 years."

This year's conference is billed as a prelude to baby boomers joining the ranks of retirees - examining strains on the nation's coffers as well as the civic energy that 78-million people with time on their hands might offer their communities.

"The conference is really about planning and funding our longevity," chairwoman Dorcas Hardy said in an interview. "We all have to think about the fact that living 30 years in "retirement' ain't what it used to be."

Proposed resolutions deal with health, finances, transportation, housing, employment and disaster preparedness. Many resolutions are so broadly worded - "strengthen Social Security," "Improve the Medicare program" - that steel-hearted budget cutters and warm fuzzy socialists alike could embrace them.

Some delegates aren't pleased. They are pushing pet programs and want fellow delegates to endorse them. But the Bush-era event has rules that squelch such freelancing.

Conference leaders - 13 Republican appointees and 4 Democratic appointees - have drafted 72 resolutions in advance. The conference's 1,200 delegates can vote for which resolutions they want to publicize and send to Congress, but they can't alter a word or submit resolutions of their own.

"This is an exercise in futility," said Broward County's Antonio Fransetta, president of the Florida chapter of the Alliance for Retired Americans. He would like to see delegates vote directly on hot-button issues such as national health care and setting Medicare prices for prescription drugs. But none of the preapproved resolutions frames those issues.

The White House doesn't "want a bunch of seniors truly and honestly defining the needs for affordable and accessible housing and defining the needs for a true prescription drug benefit," Fransetta said last week. "They don't want to be pinned down by defining resolutions they could be held accountable for."

The Alliance, largely composed of union retirees, has about 50 delegates and is planning a "spontaneous demonstration" to demand installation of the "10 percent rule" used in past conferences. Under that rule, proposed resolutions supported by 10 percent of the delegates were brought to a full floor vote.

There is precedent for such partisan jockeying.

The 1981 conference convened after Ronald Reagan took office and was talking about trimming Social Security benefits.

Florida Democratic congressman Claude Pepper, an 81-year-old champion of seniors' causes, wanted to whip up delegate opposition but was barred from addressing the conference by Reagan's appointed leaders.

No stranger to political in-fighting, Pepper stormed into the conference hotel and held an impromptu news conference in the kitchen as delegates shouted "We Shall Overcome" and "Save Social Security." It was a feast for the TV cameras. Pepper eventually was allowed to speak and the movement to cut benefits fizzled.

The 1995 conference led to legislation that helped grandparents raising grandchildren and to extra money for family caregivers. But it is best remembered for its vociferous opposition to budget-balancing Medicare cuts that House Majority Leader Newt Gingrich was proposing over at the Capitol.

Delegate after delegate used their three-minute allotment at a "speak out" session to blast back.

"I'm 66 and I'm tired of now being a criminal because I've lived too long, longer than I'm supposed to," said Boca Raton resident Ramona Shedroff. "Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid are programs that are being attacked, but we are the targets."

This year's agenda allots no "speak out" time or any other way for delegates to officially address the conference.

But they can make their mark by developing "implementation strategies" that will accompany the top resolutions in the final conference report, said Hardy, the chairwoman and Washington consultant who ran the Social Security Administration under Reagan.

Implementation strategies will specify how resolutions should be carried out, by whom and with what money. In theory, Hardy said, delegates could pass a "strengthen Medicare" resolution, then add an implementation strategy that calls for Medicare to start paying for long-term nursing home costs or a strategy that calls for Medicare to dictate drug prices to the pharmaceutical industry.

Carole Green, Florida's Elder Affairs secretary, oversees a committee dedicated to followup: How to use the final report to lobby federal, state and local lawmakers. Specific implementation strategies are critical, she said.

"The worst thing we could have happen is to have that four days there, vote on all this, put it in a book and put it on the shelf, and 10 years from now, someone will scratch their head and say, "What did they do in 2005?"'

[Last modified December 10, 2005, 00:52:07]