AARP President Visits the Bay State

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Jennie Chin Hansen
President, AARP

Second Annual Scholarship Gala

Massachusetts General Hospital
Institute of Health Professions
Boston, Massachusetts
June 12, 2008

AARP believes strongly in the collaborative approach to developing and implementing effective and sustainable solutions to our cultural, educational, social, economic, and health challenges. When we join together, we can contribute to the good of our communities in so many more ways.
Indeed, no one organization or institution has all the answers, or all the competencies and skills. The need for professional collaboration is becoming increasingly clear.

With today’s mounting pressures on governments, and with growing social and economic inequities, the need for solutions to our glaring problems and challenges has become ever more obvious—and more urgent.

As a result, even an organization with nearly 40 million members—like AARP—realizes that we can achieve our goals more effectively by reaching out and working together, rather than by working alone.

In fact, the Business Roundtable, the National Federation of Independent Business, and the Service Employees International Union have joined AARP in the largest undertaking we have initiated in our 50-year history. It’s a national grass-roots effort we call Divided We Fail—designed to engage the American people, businesses, interest groups, non-profit organizations and elected officials in finding bi-partisan solutions to achieve affordable, quality health care and long-term financial security.

There are many formal definitions of collaboration or “partnership.” But it doesn’t have to be complicated. A “partnership” can exist simply because the parties involved decide to recognize themselves as “partners” in some way, and voluntarily agree to pool their resources and talents in order to help deliver outcomes they view as mutually beneficial.

The MGH Institute of Health Professions is in the business of developing talent to address a serious problem and need in the greater Boston community and across Massachusetts—the critical workforce shortages in health care. And YOU have the resources to help them do it.

You may already be familiar with the Massachusetts Workforce Board Association—the business-led organization, which counts among its members groups as diverse as the Massachusetts Business Roundtable, the Massachusetts AFL-CIO, and the Massachusetts Association of Chamber of Commerce Executives. Sound familiar? Another successful “partnership” effort!

In their 2007 report, The Healthcare Workforce Development Imperative:
A Strategy for Change, they don’t mince words when they say, and I quote:

“There is a public health and safety crisis in Massachusetts as a result of well-documented, large and persistent worker shortages at all levels and in all occupations in the health care sector. Implementation of the new Health Care Reform Law will only intensify this dilemma.”

They go on to report:

“The health care sector is the largest in Massachusetts with nearly 460,000 employees in 2006. The job vacancy rate increased more than 50 percent from 3.8 percent or 12,530 in the 2nd quarter of 2005—to 4.4 percent or 19,150 in the 2nd quarter of 2006. This accounted for 1 of every 5 job vacancies, which surpassed all other major industries in Massachusetts.”

From the perspective of AARP, all of this is even more troubling because it is happening at precisely the time when we can least afford it—when Massachusetts, along with the rest of the nation, is about to experience a profound shift upward in the age of its population.

The number of older adults in the United States will nearly double between 2005 and 2030. The 78-million member baby boom generation begins turning 65 less than three years from now, in 2011, and life expectancy increases. The fastest growing age group in this country today is the 85 years of age and over group.

Massachusetts’s percentage of 65 and over citizens, which is now just under 13 percent, will soon begin to rise quickly and will pass 20 percent within the next 20 years, which will be a faster rate of aging growth than is projected for Florida in the same period.

And—keep this in mind—that current 13 percent of 65 and over folks already consume more than a third of all health care services. More than three-quarters of adults over 65 suffer from at least one chronic medical condition that requires ongoing care and management.

AARP is pleased to be one of the sponsors of a major report, recently released by the Institute of Medicine, Retooling for an Aging America: Building the Health Care Work Force.

There is one issue addressed by both reports that I’d like to call your attention to, because it happens to be a strategic priority of the MGH Institute.

The Retooling for an Aging America report notes that the baby boomers “will be the most diverse group of older citizens our nation has ever seen, with more education, widely dispersed families, and more racial and ethnic diversity, making their needs much different than previous generations.”

The Massachusetts report concludes, “Importantly, the lack of diversity among health care professionals must be addressed to ensure that cultural competency—a major indicator of quality—is institutionalized within our health care system.”

I am pleased to tell you that one of the MGH Institute’s five strategic priorities is focused on diversity—including recruiting more racially and ethnically diverse students to mirror our increasingly diverse population, as well as ensuring that all of its graduates are culturally competent practitioners.
  
In a nutshell, the work of the MGH Institute of Health Professions is fully in synch with the goals and priorities of AARP as we both look ahead to effectively serving our communities. I believe you would be hard put to find a better return for your efforts than you’ll realize from helping them carry out their mission.

Before I close, I suspect you may be interested in AARP’s views on health care reform in the context of this year’s presidential campaign. Both presumptive candidates, John McCain and Barack Obama, share a surprising amount of agreement on ways to re-engineer the system and foster quality.

Both candidates support efforts to improve the coordination of care and the management of chronic conditions. They also would put a greater emphasis on prevention, another important area that gets short shrift in our health care system.

They support efforts to make greater use of health information technology. And they both would move toward developing ways to measure quality and make providers more accountable.

They also have some noteworthy differences. Obama is committed to the goal of universal coverage, starting with children, but over time including everyone. McCain has not spoken out on that subject.

Unlike Obama, McCain would eliminate the tax benefit employers get for providing health care coverage, which could cause an unknown number of them to abandon their insurance programs. Instead, he would give workers a refundable tax credit to go out and buy insurance on the individual market.

This proposal represents a potentially huge change in the insurance marketplace. Supporters say it would prompt competition that would benefit consumers. Critics say it's a big risk.

So, we look forward to a spirited debate on health care reform this fall. But, when all is said and done, we believe the outlook for substantial reform is now more promising than it has been at any time in the last 15 years.

Once again I thank you for being a part of this important and lovely event this evening and I appreciate the opportunity to be a part of this important function as we all look forward to a future that serves our communities well. Thank you.