The U.S. House Committee on Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Health have advanced several healthcare bills, including the Palliative Care and Hospice Education and Training Act (PCHETA) backed by the Coalition to Transform Advanced Care (C-TAC) . PCHETA would improve the training of health professionals in palliative care, broaden national research programs in palliative care, and educate families and health professionals about the value of palliative care. C-TAC is convinced that investing in palliative care training resources is essential for ensuring that persons with serious, advanced illness get comprehensive, high-quality, person- and family-centered care that is aligned with their goals and values while maintaining their dignity. More information on C-TAC's policy and advocacy initiatives is available here .

A new American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) guideline recommends all adults 65 and older get a geriatric assessment when considering or undergoing chemotherapy, reports California Healthline . The purpose is to better identify who can tolerate intensive chemotherapy, and which persons may need modified treatment regimes due to underlying conditions, such as cognitive impairment, that oncologists often miss. Fewer than 25 percent of older adults with cancer currently receive such assessments. "These recommendations will capture the attention of oncologists, I think, and that will be incredibly valuable," says Corinne Leach at the American Cancer Society. Experts recognize a changing demographic reality for cancer specialists, who are treating increasingly older people as longevity grows. In the United States, 60 percent of those newly diagnosed with cancer are 65 or older, as are more than 60 percent of cancer survivors. The assessments recommended by ASCO can be done in about 20 minutes, and identify people at elevated risk of serious side effects from chemotherapy. Doctors can then implement measures to address these risks, such as prescribing physical therapy for older individuals with muscle weakness or ordering a diet consultation for someone with malnutrition; they also can alter chemotherapy regimens to minimize the potential for harm.

Experts at the U.S. National Institutes of Health's (NIH) National Institute on Aging recommend strategies to help reduce the risk of hyperthermia in older adults. One strategy is knowing associated risk factors. These can include age-related changes to skin such as poor blood circulation and deficient sweat glands; heart, lung, and kidney diseases, and any illness causing general weakness or fever; high blood pressure or other conditions requiring dietary adjustments; reduced sweating caused by medications like diuretics, sedatives, tranquilizers, and certain heart and blood pressure drugs; taking multiple drugs for various conditions; being significantly overweight or underweight; dehydration; and consumption of alcohol. Also compounding the risk are lifestyle factors such as extremely hot living quarters, lack of transportation, overdressing, visits to overcrowded places, and lack of awareness of proper response to weather conditions. Older people are recommended to remain indoors on particularly hot and humid days, especially when an air pollution alert is in effect. They should stay cool by drinking plenty of fluids and wearing light-colored, loose-fitting clothes in natural fabrics. People who lack fans or air conditioning should maintain coolness in their homes as much as possible or go to cool centers, which are often hosted by senior communities, religious groups, and social service organizations.

The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force recommends in guidelines published in JAMA that women 65 and older continue screening for osteoporosis to prevent fractures, while some younger women at a higher risk also could benefit from bone tests, reports Reuters . Typically, women with osteoporosis are most often treated with bisphosphonates, which slow the rate at which the body removes old bone, allowing time to regrow bone and make fractures less likely. However, these medications can cause nausea and abdominal pain, and rare but more serious side effects such as cracks in the thighbone or jawbone damage. Alternative treatments include estrogen or two injected medications, denosumab and teriparatide. The task force notes about 12 million American adults age 50 and older will likely develop osteoporosis by 2020.

A study published in Diabetes Care associated type 1 and type 2 diabetes with poorer memory and reduced psychomotor speed in aging seniors, reports Healio . "During middle age, they show mild cognitive deficits, but it is unknown whether severity increases with aging or whether cognitive profiles are similar to those of age-matched peers with and without diabetes," says Harvard Medical School's Gail Musen. Her team examined cognition and associated complications among people with long-term type 1 diabetes, comparing long-term cognitive outcomes of 82 subjects with 50 or more years of type 1 diabetes with 31 age-matched individuals with type 2 diabetes and 30 age-matched non-diabetic controls. Before the study was completed, participants had to have blood glucose levels that exceeded 4.4 mmol/L. Both participants with type 1 and type 2 diabetes demonstrated poorer immediate and delayed recall and psychomotor speed than controls, while worsening executive function also was seen in diabetic subjects. The researchers determined hyperglycemia to be a more likely cause of cognitive decline in type 1 diabetes than insulin, and cardiovascular disease was tied to reduced executive function while proliferative diabetic retinopathy was linked to slower psychomotor speed among participants with 50 or more years of type 1 diabetes. "Efforts should be made to further study this population and screen ... populations and to conduct imaging studies, including those using MRI, to better understand these processes," the team recommends. "Ultimately, examination of postmortem specimens may also help clarify the relative roles of hyperglycemia, hypoglycemia, and insulin resistance and enable therapeutic intervention."

The high level of student loan debt is threatening the retirement savings of Americans, reports BenefitsPro . Lori Trawinski, director of banking and finance at the AARP Public Policy Institute, says "we consider it a looming threat," adding that "the idea that you could have student loan debt of your own that lasts 20 or 30 years, and then pick up some for your child that could last another 20 or 30 years—you're looking at a lifetime of carrying student loan debt in some form. Depending on one's income level, that that can really hamper the ability to have financial security in retirement." Student debt is growing so fast that a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau analysis of New York Federal Reserve data finds that the number of American borrowers over age 60 has ballooned from 2005's 700,000 to 2.8 million in 2015. Lenders often garnish Social Security checks to get back payments for student loans — something that AARP opposes. In fact, Government Accountability Office figures indicate that in the 2015 fiscal year the government garnished the Social Security benefits of almost 114,000 student loan borrowers over 50 years old, reducing their benefits, on average, by more than $140 per month.

Trade groups are drafting legislation to revise how insurance regulators contend with seniors' claims after their long-term care companies become insolvent, reports Politico Pro . A 2017 analysis determined most commercial long-term care policies are classified as healthcare but are primarily drafted by life insurance firms. The Florida Association of Health Plans (FAHP) is spearheading a measure that it hopes will reach industry consensus, and it says at least 10 other states have passed similar legislation. FAHP's new policy would split the burden to pay claims for insolvent companies relatively equally between healthcare — including HMOs — and life insurance. FAHP CEO Audrey Brown says the measure would more fairly distribute the risk for failed policies while safeguarding consumers who have been paying into them for years. "We know this will be a huge liability in Florida because of our disproportionate share of seniors," she says. "They will need the benefit of long-term care policies. This is aimed at making sure there is enough money to take care of their claims."

KIRO reports a teenager, Clara Daly, helped a blind and deaf man communicate on a recent Alaska Airlines flight, and the story went viral thanks to a fellow passenger's online posting of the interaction, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution . The passenger, Lynette Scribner, said the man, Tim Cook, was going home to Portland's Brookdale Senior Living after visiting his sister. When a flight attendant asked if a passenger on board knew American Sign Language, ASL student Daly, 15, rang her call button. When Daly found out Cook could communicate only if someone signed into his hand, she went to help. Cook asked Daly questions and she sign-spelled answers into his hand. Daly learned ASL because she suffers from dyslexia, and it was the easiest foreign language for her to learn. "Clara was amazing," said an Alaska Airlines flight attendant in the news release. "You could tell Tim was very excited to have someone he could speak to — and she was such an angel." After the plane landed, Cook met a service provider from Brookdale Senior Living at the gate, and said the flight was the best trip he's ever been on.

Mounting pressure to ensure fair pay throughout the workplace is sparking changes to corporate America's employee compensation and performance management programs, reports SHRM Online . Willis Towers Watson's 2018 Getting Compensation Right Survey shows that most U.S. employers give themselves high marks when it comes to having formal processes in place to prevent bias or inconsistency in their hiring and compensation decisions. Nevertheless, the research shows, 60 percent of them are planning to take some action in 2018 to prevent bias by: re-evaluating their recruitment and promotion processes (44 percent), conducting a gender pay or pay equity diagnostic (42 percent), and/or increasing communication of policies and benefits that promote an inclusive culture (33 percent). To promote a more inclusive and diverse workforce, companies are looking to establish or support internal networks for females and minorities (45 percent) and improve flexible work arrangements (44 percent).

U.S. Department of Labor data indicates that 91 percent of the net increase in jobs held by those at least 25 years old in the last year are filled by those with at least a bachelor's degree, reports MarketWatch . The last recession seems to have widened the wage chasm between college-educated and less-educated workers. Anthony Carnevale with Georgetown University's Center on Education and the Workforce says Labor's data illustrates growing employment for those with at least a bachelor's degree, lower gains for those with some college education, and slippage in employment by those with a high school degree or less. He partly attributes this trend to upscaling, and a study he co-authored found about 60 percent of the 55 million job openings in this decade are to replace retiring baby boomers; however, employers will now demand these replacements have better training instead of allowing them to learn on the job. The fact that most new jobs are going to the college-educated shows the value of the $1.5 trillion in student loans that have accumulated. Georgetown estimated that 66 percent of the new jobs being created require some post-secondary education, with about 33 percent needing at least a bachelor's degree. A Harvard Business School study warned employers seeking college graduates makes many "middle-skills jobs" harder to fill, and once hired, subjects employers to greater turnover rates as well as higher pay.