Aging

Charles “Lindy” Cavell could never forget what the U.S. military tried to hide. Cavell fought to bring to light the secret mustard gas testing program he had participated in during World War II and for VA compensation for the test subjects. He died at home Wednesday at 89.

Cavell was featured prominently in an NPR investigation last year that found the Department of Veterans Affairs failed to notify mustard gas test subjects — who had been sworn to secrecy about the testing — of their eligibility for compensation, and routinely denied help to those who qualified for it.

During the last year of his life, Cavell was finally granted additional benefits and some back pay after a 26-year battle with the VA, according to his daughter, Linda Smith.

“I think he felt like he had finally accomplished something, and he was relieved that other service members were being recognized” as a result of the stories he was featured in, Smith said.

Cavell was a 19-year-old Navy recruit fresh out of boot camp in 1945 when a commanding officer offered the chance to participate in a “special program.” The officer gave few details, but said volunteers would get two weeks’ vacation and an award in exchange for participating.

“We were just a bunch of young kids. We didn’t know any better,” Cavell told NPR last year.

More than 60,000 Army and Navy troops raised their hands for the experiments, which ranged in severity from a few beads of toxic gas dropped onto the undersides of their wrists, to full-body inundation.

Cavell said when officers ordered him and 11 other test subjects into a heated gas chamber at the Naval Research Laboratories in Washington, D.C., it was too late to back out.

“We had ceased to be volunteers,” Cavell told NPR last year.

Officers locked the chamber door from the outside and piped in mustard agent.

The military kept the tests off of the troops’ personnel records — and swore the troops to secrecy under threat of dishonorable discharge or court-martial.

Half a century later, in 1990, Cavell and a few other test subjects went public with their stories, pressuring the Pentagon into declassifying the experiments and releasing test subjects from their oaths of secrecy. But even after the secret was out, and despite assurances from the Pentagon and VA, trying to obtain compensation proved futile for many.

The first heart attack hit Cavell at age 40 — and was followed by decades of chronic vascular and respiratory ailments requiring more than 20 operations at the VA hospital near his home in Midlothian, Va. He also developed congestive heart failure and kidney disease.

For decades, the VA refused to cover his medical expenses, saying Cavell hadn’t proved his participation in the tests — even though he had more proof than most: From the Navy, he’d obtained copies of the laboratory notebooks from the experiments. They described the tests in great detail, including the temperature and humidity levels inside the gas chamber. Down the left side of the page, the names of test subjects are listed, with Cavell’s name written in neat handwriting. But that wasn’t enough for the VA.

“They say, ‘We need more information,’ ” Cavell told NPR last year. “It doesn’t make sense.”

Cavell waged a steady fight for benefits while he worked long hours at the TV repair shop he owned, to support his wife Hilda and four daughters.

“He never wanted us to be involved in any of that. But behind the scenes he was working on paperwork,” according to his daughter Linda Smith.

Her father loved people, Smith told NPR, but he was a quiet presence at home. During retirement, he often spent time in the garage, sitting at an old metal desk under fluorescent tube lights, fixing household appliances.

“He didn’t share a whole lot. I think the tinkering and working on computers kept the mind away,” Smith said.

But sometimes the memories of being inside a gas chamber overcame him.

“There was no handle on the door. You couldn’t get out,” he told NPR last year. “And that’s what I have problems with today. If I go to a locked door, I panic sometimes to try to get out.”

Cavell’s health declined rapidly in the final years of his life, according to his family.

Earlier this month, he chose to go off of dialysis because of the pain.

Five days before he died of kidney failure, he took his final project out to the garage — a white Sunbeam toaster that wouldn’t engage — but never got to finish it.

He is survived by his wife, Hilda Cavell, and three daughters — Linda, Mary and Joan. His daughter Margaret died in 2010.

A warm sun blanketed his family at his funeral in Richmond, Va., on Saturday. Two Navy officers folded an American flag and presented it to his wife while a third played taps.

In his obituary, Cavell’s daughter Smith wrote that her father “went on a new journey to a place where there are no more wars to fight mentally or physically.”

Copyright 2016 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

California has a problem: Fifty-two percent of its managers in the state workforce could decide in the next five years that they’re tired of working, grab their retirement packages and go. Their departure would create a serious brain drain for the state, which has the largest number of state employees in the country — 220,000.

So Jeff Douglas, California’s chief of workforce development, is trying different tactics to keep senior workers on the job: offering a flexible work schedule, promoting work-life balance and creating the first government-wide employee management survey to assess the needs of workers. The idea is to find out who is leaving — and why.

Douglas knows that efforts to keep senior workers — especially managers, specialists, and highly educated and knowledgeable employees — on the job are at best stopgap measures. Eventually, the state will have to shore up its talent reserves as baby boomers age out of the state workforce. “Because people can walk right now, we have to be ready if they do,” he said.

Like California, nearly every state and locality faces the imminent departure of retirement-eligible employees. Anywhere from 30 to 40 percent of state workers are eligible for retirement, said Leslie Scott, executive director of the National Association of State Personnel Executives (NASPE). And states are scrambling to find ways to retain their most valuable seasoned employees.

Finding replacements won’t be easy. State employees are more educated than the rest of the nation’s workforce, including federal and local government employees, according to the Congressional Research Service.

So state personnel executives are experimenting with a variety of approaches to hang on to experience, including job-sharing and telecommuting, delayed retirement programs that pay lump sums to would-be retirees to keep working, training and development, and reward and recognition programs. They also are stepping up recruiting efforts to attract older employees who work in the private sector.

The idea, Douglas said, is to create a work environment “where you can stay longer and work longer.”

Retention Efforts

In Tennessee, where 32 percent of the state workforce is eligible for retirement, state workers can take advantage of the “temporary employment option.” The program allows retirees to work for up to 120 days during a 12-month period. This way, the state can “recruit” high-performing retirees to assist with special projects, said Rebecca Hunter, the state’s commissioner of human resources.

“This allows an agency to benefit from the transfer of institutional knowledge and is a nice transition to full retirement for the employee,” Hunter said.

In Ohio, state workers in the Office of Opportunities for Ohioans with Disabilities are allowed to schedule their work hours as they see fit, as long as they work somewhere between 6 a.m. and 6 p.m.

In Colorado, where 20 percent of the workforce in the state’s information technology division is eligible for retirement, the agency encourages retirement-age professionals to work with younger workers to ensure that knowledge is passed down to the next generation.

This is particularly important when it comes to dealing with older, “legacy” technology and other specialized fields, said Karen Wilcox, director of human resources in the Colorado governor’s information technology office. “Knowledge loss is the most critical issue,” Wilcox said.

In Virginia, where a quarter of state employees will be eligible to retire in the next five years, state human resources executives use “intense data” to predict who will be retiring and what is pushing them out, said Sara Redding Wilson, Virginia’s director of human resources.

“Only a small fraction is going, and we know why,” Redding Wilson said. Armed with data, she said, the state can tailor its retention efforts — while finding ways to recruit the next wave of talent.

The areas with the highest turnover rates are in corrections, juvenile justice and behavioral health, Redding Wilson said, fields with less flexibility in scheduling and that don’t pay as much.

Some states, such as Alabama and Arizona, and some localities, such as Los Angeles, Pinellas County, Florida, and St. Louis, let potential retirees take advantage of the Deferred Retirement Option Program (DROP). It works this way: public workers — such as police officers — who reach retirement age commit to continuing to work for a fixed period. They go on collecting their regular paycheck. And when they retire, they are paid a lump sum bonus of as much as 90 percent of the salaries they earned while continuing to work.

DROP programs can be an attractive incentive to keep talented employees on the job longer, while reducing costs for recruiting and training new employees, said Angela Curl, assistant professor of family studies and social work at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio.

But not all states have kept them going. In 2001, Missouri implemented a similar program, called BackDROP, which offered state workers more flexibility in the start and stop dates. (Roughly a quarter of Missouri’s state employees are eligible to retire this year.)

In a 2014 report, Missouri state employees said that the BackDROP program had been an incentive for them to stay on the job. Some used the money to pay off debt, while others put in savings for their children to inherit, something that they cannot do with traditional pension plans, Curl said.

But in 2010, legislators amended the program. Employees hired after Dec. 31, 2010, aren’t eligible to participate in the program.

Aging Out Will Continue

Public sector employees skew older than private workers. In 2013, 52 percent of full-time federal, state and local public employees were between ages 45 and 64, compared to 42 percent of full-time private sector workers, according to theCongressional Research Service. Fifty percent of state workers and 52 percent of local government workers were in that age group in 2013.

And states and local governments have already seen their workforces shrink in the past decade, thanks to budget cuts enacted during the Great Recession, according to the Center for State and Local Government Excellence.

State agencies also cut back on training and development programs, NASPE’s Scott said. As a result, younger employees aren’t prepared to step in to key management positions, she said. Meanwhile, many state workers — those who weren’t laid off in the midst of cutbacks — postponed retirement.

Some still are, which can give states some breathing room in which to plan to replace them. In Virginia, for instance, Redding Wilson said some younger boomers in their 50s are staying on the job to keep the state’s health care coverage.

But that won’t last long. As the economy continues to improve, more state workers are expected to retire, Scott said. And the remaining talent pool for top managers is much smaller. During the recession, many layoffs happened at the middle-manager level, she said.

The retirement wave will hit all sectors of government, from teachers to nurses to law enforcement. But finance, engineering and management, along with information technology, are areas that could see the biggest losses, according to Elizabeth Kellar, the center’s CEO. There are also big challenges to recruiting and retaining nurses, epidemiologists and doctors for public health jobs, she said.

“It’s a huge issue,” Kellar said. To maintain a strong workforce, she said, states need to focus on recruiting and retaining good people, develop talent through training, offer competitive compensation and have a succession plan for passing on duties to younger workers.

At the same time, states must adjust to the characteristics of a new generation of workers, who are more likely to hop from job to job, and between the private and public sectors.

“If they’re coming in [to work for the states], they’re not staying,” Scott said.

Planning for the Future

In Maine, where roughly a quarter of the state’s IT workforce is eligible for retirement in the next two years, “about 3,000 years of experience is going to be walking out the door,” said Jim Smith, Maine’s chief information officer.

“It’s going to be transformational. We’re going to need to do something radical to address this change.”

For the past couple of years, his agency has been focusing on how to keep seasoned employees on the job while attracting new talent. His agency allows retirement-age employees to work part-time. But, he said, “That’s a short-term solution.”

To attract millennials, his agency drastically streamlined its hiring process. Now, applicants can apply for jobs using a mobile app. Applications have increased 35 percent since the app launched, Smith said.

The state also launched an intern-mentor program, partnering with local universities and community colleges to identify potential hires and pair them with veteran workers. Since the program started in 2013, 70 percent of the interns have become full-time employees, he said.

But the state isn’t just focused on hiring young workers. It’s also recruiting seasoned professionals who’ve spent their careers in the private sector and don’t mind taking a pay cut to work in civil service.

One example of this: Smith. In 2012, after more than 30 years working in the private financial services sector, he decided, rather than retiring, he’d go to work for his home state. “I wanted an opportunity to give back,” Smith said.

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Beating the Brain Drain: States Focus on Retaining Older Workers

A Dillingham woman has been charged with forging her grandmother’s checks, stealing some $3,500 over a two month period. Police believe this is another example of the elderly being ripped off for drug money.

According to DPD, Brianna M. Brandon, 26, took 16 checks and wrote them out for different amounts and occasionally to different people.

The branch manager at Wells Fargo became suspicious by the behavior of those cashing the checks and called the account owner Mrs. Mable Brandon to ask about those payments. According to police, the elder Brandon said she had not written those checks or given her granddaughter any money. She then notified police, and told them she had recently kicked her granddaughter’s boyfriend out of the house for his drug use, and suspected Brianna had gone with him and taken the check book.

Questioned at the station, police say Brianna Brandon admitted to forging all of the checks and stealing from her grandmother. She’s facing 17 felony charges: 16 for forgery and one for theft.

Last week police charged two women with scamming an elderly man out of close to a $1000 after they claimed to be his new fuel distributor.

Police believe there is a pattern of elders being scammed or stolen from to support expensive drug habits, which can cost a user $100 a day or more to sustain.

For the next two months, about 3,800 seniors will see their monthly checks from the state’s senior benefits program cut to $8 a month. That’s down from as much as $125 in February.

The $8 level isn’t permanent – it’s a correction of an overpayment caused by an accounting error, says Monica Windom, chief of policy and program development at the Alaska Department of Health and Social Services.

“There was a programming error. It should have continued at $47 but instead it issued $125 again. So we were able to go in and stop the paper warrants and reissue them at the correct amount but some of the direct deposits we were not able to stop, it was too late,” Windom said.

This is the third time this year the group has seen their payments change.

Nearly 12,000 Alaskans qualify for the benefits program and payments are based on their monthly income. Last year, the legislature axed more than $3 million from the program.  While the monthly benefits for 6,000 of the poorest seniors were unaffected, some low-income seniors’ benefits fell nearly 60 percent.

To deal with the loss, program managers cut the benefit checks to the seniors in the program at higher income levels. With just a few weeks notice, more than 5,000 seniors saw their payments drop from $125 a month to $47. The first batch of newly reduced checks went out in March. Then in April, $125 checks were issued again.

May and June checks will be $8.

“But altogether they will get the same amount as they would have if we had issued $47 for each month,” Windom said.

The payments are likely to change for the fourth time this year in July when the new state budget takes effect.

Poor people who reside in expensive, well-educated cities such as San Francisco tend to live longer than low-income people in less affluent places, according to a study of more than a billion Social Security and tax records.

The study, published in JAMA, the Journal of the American Medical Association, bolsters what was already well known — the poor tend to have shorter lifespans than those with more money. But it also says that among low-income people, big disparities exist in life expectancy from place to place, said Raj Chetty, professor of economics at Stanford University.

“There are some places where the poor are doing quite well, gaining just as much in terms of life span as the rich, but there are other places where they’re actually going in the other direction, where the poor are living shorter lives today than they did in the past,” Chetty said, in an interview with NPR.

For example, low-income people in Birmingham, Ala., live about as long as the rich, but in Tampa, Fla., the poor have actually lost ground.

Chetty and his co-authors collected more than 1.4 billion records from the Social Security Administration and the Internal Revenue Service to try to measure the relationship between income and life expectancy.

“There are vast gaps in life expectancy between the richest and poorest Americans,” Chetty said. “Men in the top 1 percent distribution level live about 15 years longer than men in the bottom 1 percent on the income distribution in the United States.

“To give you a sense of the magnitude, men in the bottom 1 percent have life expectancy comparable to the average life expectancy in Pakistan or Sudan.”

And where life spans are concerned, the rich are getting richer.

Since 2001, life expectancy has increased by 2.3 years for the wealthiest 5 percent of American men and by nearly 3 years for similarly situated women. Meanwhile, life expectancy has increased barely at all for the poorest 5 percent.

Among the study’s findings was that poor people in affluent cities such as San Francisco and New York tend to live longer than people of similar income levels in rust belt cities such as Detroit, he said.

What accounts for the disparity isn’t clear, Chetty says.

It may be that some cities such as San Francisco may be better at promoting healthier lifestyles, with smoking bans, for example, or perhaps people tend to adopt healthier habits if they live in a place where everyone else is doing it, he says.

The study suggests that the relationship between life expectancy and income is not ironclad, and changes at the local level can make a big difference.

“What our study shows is that thinking about these issues of inequality and health and life expectancy at a local level is very fruitful, and thinking about policies that change health behaviors at a local level is likely to be important,” he says.

Chetty notes that the study has clear implications for Social Security and Medicare. The fact that poor people don’t live as long means they are paying into the system without getting the same benefits, a fact that needs to be considered in any discussion about raising the retirement age, he says.

The study was co-authored by Michael Stepner and Sarah Abraham of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Benjamin Scuderi, David Cutler and Augustin Bergeron of Harvard University; Shelby Lin of McKinsey and Co.; and Nicholas Turner of the U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Tax Analysis.

Copyright 2016 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.