Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein with the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) has announced the establishment of an interagency task force targeting the prevention of consumer and market fraud, reports Financial Advisor . He said the task force will combine U.S. attorney's offices, DOJ departments, and enforcement agency partners to combat fraud targeting American citizens. "One of our first priorities will be to survey all of our members and identify areas of vulnerability to ensure that we devote appropriate resources to address them," Rosenstein noted. Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Jay Clayton emphasized that deterring retail fraud and preserving and returning investors' money is essential to the agency, which will continue to focus on Ponzi schemes and the sale of unsuitable and complex products targeting seniors and unsophisticated investors. "This new task force on market integrity and consumer fraud will allow us to do even more in a coordinated way," Rosenstein pledged. "The president's order directs the task force to invite participation from our law enforcement agency partners in many departments and agencies. By working together, we can achieve more effective and more efficient deterrents."

The House Ways and Means Committee has passed four bills to expand health savings accounts, and later will consider seven additional measures with similar goals, according to Congressional Quarterly . Rep. Kevin Brady (R-Texas) said the markup concerned offering people more choice, while Rep. Richard E. Neal (D-Mass.) criticized the bills for failing to address healthcare challenges for Americans. "The provisions we are considering today provide America's wealthiest another option to stash tax-free money at a cost of $92 billion to taxpayers," he warned. The sole Republican-only bill to advance was a measure allowing seniors older than 65 who are entitled to enroll in Medicare but continue to work and maintain some employer benefits to retain a health savings account. The committee failed to adopt an amendment to postpone implementation of the bill until the Medicare Hospital Trust Fund's report shows a reversal of its losses under the 2017 Republican tax law overhaul. Democrats also excoriated the GOP for not offering specific ways to cover the bills' cost, which the Joint Committee on Taxation estimated would amount to $92.1 billion over 10 years. The majority of the bills are designed to broaden the use of health savings accounts, which generally have bipartisan backing.

The House Financial Services Committee will vote today on a bill to establish an interdivisional task force at the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to protect senior investors, reports InvestmentNews . The measure would create a team of staff members from various relevant SEC offices to examine the challenges facing older investors, with a focus on problems seniors have with financial services providers and investment products. The task force would report its findings every two years to the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee and the House Financial Services Committee, recommending specific regulatory or statutory changes that would benefit senior investors. The bill also calls for the Government Accountability Office to study and report on the economic costs of the financial exploitation of older adults within one year of the bill's enactment.

A study published in Healthy Aging Research examined a random sample of 128 male and female U.S. residents age 65 and older living in communities in 22 states to measure individual wellness with a Wellness Assessment Tool (WEL), reports Medical Xpress . WEL lets individuals express interest in or intention to participate in wellness activities. After a one-on-one assessment, the individuals were offered the option to identify wellness priorities, which were analyzed. Older adults were found to value and prioritize the dimensions of physical, social, and emotional wellness over the intellectual, occupational, and spiritual dimensions. The researchers say enhancing wellness in all dimensions contributes to older adults' sense of and ability to maintain independence, "a lifestyle quality manifested vis-a-vis personal priorities related to the six original dimensions of wellness." Wellness in even one dimension was determined to contribute to independence. "Independence represented the ability to engage socially with family and friends; to live according to their current standards; to remain at home, and to enjoy life," the team notes. It is the study's recommendation that community-based wellness interventions be deployed to support aging in place for older adults, concentrating on marketing them toward improving independence, instead of wellness, to reflect adults' priorities and encourage participation.

A study by University of Texas Southwestern researchers published in eLife has pinpointed the exact moment when a healthy protein becomes toxic but has not yet formed deadly tangles in the brain that cause Alzheimer's, reports ScienceDaily . "We think of this as the Big Bang of tau pathology," says UT Southwestern's Mark Diamond. The investigators extracted tau proteins from human brains and isolated them as single molecules. They determined tau's damaging form exposes a part of itself that is normally folded within, which makes it bind to other tau proteins and enables the accumulation of neuron-killing tangles. The next stage for Diamond's team is developing a simple clinical test that examines a person's blood or spinal fluid to detect the first biomarkers of the abnormal tau protein. Diamond also notes projects underway to devise a treatment that makes the diagnosis actionable are just as valuable. "The hunt is on to build on this finding and make a treatment that blocks the neurodegeneration process where it begins," he says. "If it works, the incidence of Alzheimer's disease could be substantially reduced. That would be amazing."

U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar on Monday called for more oversight of hospitals that get drug discounts under the federal 340B program, reports MedPage Today . "By one estimate, discounted purchases under 340B totaled $16 billion in 2016 — a fourfold increase just since 2009," Azar said at the annual meeting of 340B Health, a trade group for 340B hospitals. "This growth has occurred without any increase in statutory oversight," he continued. Azar called for two kinds of reforms for the 340B pricing program: "greater transparency surrounding how these discounts are being used, and reforms to reduce the gap between discounted prices and the reimbursement provided, particularly by government programs."

A nonprofit organization affiliated with Purchase College will this month sell $14.5 million in unrated tax-exempt notes to initiate development of Broadview, a 385-apartment retirement community on its 500-acre campus, reports Financial Advisor . The project will feature a "learning commons" with classrooms, studio, and performance spaces. Broadview is the most recent publicly-funded development to capitalize on demand from retirees to live in communities near universities where they can take courses, attend art exhibits and sports events, and maintain links to their alma mater. Similar senior communities have been developed near the University of Texas, the University of Florida, Cornell University, Dartmouth College, Oberlin College, and Duke University, among others. Bloomberg reports about $2.4 billion of tax exempt bonds were sold in 2017 exclusively for new senior living communities, while this year developers have sold about $730 million solely for projects. The usual community needs some $20 million of seed funding to get to the financing stage; shareholders will obtain a leasehold mortgage on the property that lets them take over the project should the owners default. New York state passed a bill in 2011 authorizing a 75-year ground lease to the Purchase development. Purchase will get $2 million a year in rent, climbing 10 percent every fifth year through the 71st year of the lease, and $8 million yearly for the final five years. The Purchase project's initial stage includes 220 independent living apartments, 18 assisted living suites, and 12 bedrooms for persons with Alzheimer's or dementia.

PGIM Investments' 2018 Retirement Preparedness Survey of 1,514 adults estimated that 62 percent of millennials planned for retirement only when they had enough money, but 31 percent were not saving at all because they did not see "the point of planning for retirement because anything can happen between now and then," reports ThinkAdvisor . In addition, 25 percent of all pre-retirees were uncertain about how much they needed to save to retire. The poll also determined Gen Xer respondents were more worried about retirement than millennials, calculating that they would need $2.5 million on average to retire, while millennials estimated that they would require $1.1 million. PGIM learned that millennials think "people will no longer retire comfortably in the future," while nearly 66 percent believed full-time employment will largely vanish and freelancers will comprise at least 75 percent of the U.S. workforce. The modern retiree usually bases their decision to retire on age and eligibility for Social Security or pensions, but the survey found future generations said when they retire will be shaped less by age and more by reaching a certain level of affluence. Overall debt levels for households nearing or already in retirement have risen from 54 percent in 1992 to 68 percent in 2016, and with millennials saddled with student loans, that issue becomes increasingly important.

A study published in JAMA Psychiatry suggests active participation in intellectual pursuits, such as reading and playing board games or card games, may delay or prevent dementia in older adults, reports MedScape . The researchers studied 15,582 community-living individuals who presented to the Elderly Health Centers of the Department of Health in Hong Kong from Jan. 1, 2005 to June 30, 2005. Subjects were free of dementia, and scored higher than the education-specific cutoff on the Cantonese version of the Mini-Mental State Examination at baseline. The participants were followed for up to six years with incident clinical dementia being the outcome. Those who developed incident dementia tended to be older than those who did not develop dementia. Subjects who developed dementia were mainly female and with lower educational attainment, and the prevalence of physical and psychiatric comorbidities was higher in this subgroup. They also engaged in healthy lifestyle practices to a lesser degree than those who did not develop dementia. Although nearly all participants reported engaging in some type of daily leisure activities, the dementia-free ones engaged in more varieties of leisure activities at baseline than those who developed dementia, while a larger proportion engaged in intellectual activities. A greater proportion of those who stayed dementia free reported participation in intellectual activities three years after baseline in comparison with those who developed dementia during years four to six. The proportion of subjects who participated in daily intellectual activities but not recreational or social activities at baseline was substantially larger in the cognitively stable cohort.

INF Robotics has developed robots to offer seniors entertainment and companionship, as well as supply access to emergency services 24/7, track misplaced items, and remind people of appointments and when it is time for them to take medicine, reports Voice of America News . The robots stand slightly over a meter tall, and feature a digital screen in their torsos for virtual check-ins with family and caregivers. INF Robotics founder Anthony Nunez says the robots were developed to help seniors age in place while relieving their caregivers of some of the burden. "We're leveraging the artificial intelligence within our platform to help seniors make better decisions, to allow them stay in their home," he notes. "We're also working on machine learning on a platform and some cognitive computing to identify patterns within the seniors' daily habits that could lead to an adverse event, and identifying those ahead of time, then using our cloud computing on a platform to get that info to caregivers before something happens." INF Robotics employee Carla Rodriguez says the robots' simple design offers ease of use, and the company also consults their potential customers to decide which features they need most in the machines. "Seniors would give us their feedback, 'We don't like this, we don't like that,' we come in and change it," she says.