JANE GROSS writes that tucked into the huge new health care law is a whopping $777 million, spread over the next four years, for programs to prevent and prosecute elder abuse. Advocates for these programs have been begging Congress for more money since 1978. Now they are celebrating as if they had won the lottery.
The provisions in the law are all but identical to those in the Elder Justice Act, which was championed by the National Center on Elder Abuse and its coalition partners for more than 30 years, through Congressional hearings and four failed attempts since 2002, despite bipartisan support, to get the bill to the Senate floor.
Under the new plan, state and local adult protective service programs will have the first dedicated financing stream from the federal government. These agencies investigate reports of abuse, neglect and financial exploitation of elderly and disabled adults, and then insure the safety of those proven to have been victimized.
“It’s a momentous day for the victims and the people who serve them,” said Joe Synder, the director of older adult protective services at the Philadelphia Corporation for Aging and the public policy chairman and former president of the National Adult Protective Services Organization. “We have been waiting for this forever.”
The act provides financing for 1,700 new investigators of elder abuse around the country, for state demonstration grants to test various new approaches to adult protective services, to support existing state ombudsmen and to train new ones to investigate complaints related to long-term care facilities, including assisted living facilities and nursing homes.
The new law will also create a coordinating council to make further recommendations on preventing elder abuse to the federal secretary of Health and Human Services in a report due in two years.
Separately within the health care package, another new federal law, the Patient Safety and Abuse Prevention Act, creates a national system of criminal background checks for those seeking employment in nursing homes and other long-term care facilities.
Among the organizations applauding the move, though not formally part of the Elder Justice Coalition, is the Financial Services Roundtable, which represents 100 of the nation’s largest banking, insurance and investment companies. Some of them have already seen how small expenditures in training low-level bank employees can protect the elderly from the most common forms of abuse: financial exploitation by family members, trusted friends or caregivers, and financial scams perpetrated by strangers.
Bank tellers, because of their regular contact with customers, are often the first to detect odd behavior in a client and changes in the usage pattern of their accounts, or to see that new participants are involved in an elderly client’s financial affairs. Mr. Synder was among the initiators of one early pilot program in Philadelphia, at Wachovia banks, now owned by Wells Fargo. Research from the program showed that tellers were correct in seven out of 10 cases in which they thought something was amiss. Among the red flags were abrupt increases in credit or debit card activity, repetitive withdrawals over a short period of time or at odd hours, large withdrawals from previously inactive accounts, the addition of a new authorized signers on accounts and statements sent to an address other than the vulnerable adult’s home.
A division of the roundtable has recently revised its 2003 handbook for training purposes, which could be used by any bank that chose to try a ground-level approach to preventing financial abuse of the elderly.
All by themselves, alert and well-trained bank tellers could have significant impact on financial abuse, especially if their numbers were to grow. A 2001 study by the National Association of Adult Protective Service Administrators reported 38,015 documented cases of financial exploitation of the elderly, a population that by 2030 will double to 71 million — about 20 percent of Americans.
The same study also found that only one in 14 cases of elder abuse is reported, which could mean a real count of more than a half million financial abuse cases annually. Another report, in 2009, by the MetLife Mature Market institute estimated the annual cost of financial abuse of elders to be $2.6 billion (PDF). By comparison, financing for these new programs is a bargain.
For more information contact Senior Solutions at (954) 456-8984 or toll free at 1-800-213-3524
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