Hands to Help Seniors

View From A Nonprofit Serving Carmel, Carmel Valley, Gonzalez, Greenfield, King City, Marina, Monterey, Pacific Grove, Pebble Beach, Salinas, Seaside And Soledad California

Women Alive! Emergency Shelter is in the process of a badly needed fundraising period to try to improve the facilities at Dorothy's Place.  It's a great cause.  The shelter serves about 190 women per year on average, almost all of them senior citizens.   They come in at 7:00 p.m., get a hot meal, and then are allowed to spend the night, leaving at 6:00 in the morning.  Management at Dorothy's Place is hoping that with new funding, they will have more resources so that they can spend extra time with these seniors, counseling them on mental health services.  They would also like to improve the facility along with adding more staff.  I hope they are successful; this is a much needed resource on the Monterey Peninsula.  To find out how you can help, go to http://www.dorothysplace.org/.

Please note that this blog reflects my personal opinion and may or may not reflect the opinion of Hands to Help Seniors and the individual members comprising the Board of Governors.

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View From A Nonprofit Serving Carmel, Carmel Valley, Gonzalez, Greenfield, King City, Marina, Monterey, Pacific Grove, Pebble Beach, Salinas, Seaside And Soledad California

In a sad statement on what happens to the government when budgets are cut too severely, an administrative law judge said that Social Security is pushing through disability claims for people who probably don't deserve them just to clear up the claims backlog.  A former Social Security judge, J.E. Sullivan, told a reporter, "The only thing that matters in the adjudication process is signing that final decision."  Thankfully, something is going to be done about this.  The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee has launched an investigation of judges which have high approval rates when claims have already been rejected twice by field offices or state agencies.  I hope they are successful in stopping this.  Approving a disability claim which isn't valid could cost over $1 million over the lifetime of the recipient, depending on their age and the amount of the monthly payment.  We certainly can't afford this given our budget crisis.

Please note that this blog reflects my personal opinion and may or may not reflect the opinion of Hands to Help Seniors and the individual members comprising the Board of Governors.

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View From A Nonprofit Serving Carmel, Carmel Valley, Gonzalez, Greenfield, King City, Marina, Monterey, Pacific Grove, Pebble Beach, Salinas, Seaside And Soledad California

I was not surprised to read that low-income renters across the country are facing an increasingly bleak outlook in their search for affordable housing.  It's a very difficult situation here on the Monterey Peninsula, particularly for senior citizens which are living on a fixed income.  The problem is two-fold.  First, there has never been enough low-income housing to go around to begin with.  Second, more people have fallen into the official poverty zone, and there aren't new units being built to accommodate them.  A recently released study done at Harvard University found that between 2007 and 2011, the number of extremely low-income renters (defined as those earning 30% or less of the median income in their local area) rose 2.5% to 12.1 million.  Harvard put out a report entitled The State of the Nation's Housing, and it's fairly depressing.  Between 2007 and 2011, as the extremely poor were increasing, the number of affordable rental units fell from 6.9 million to 6.8 million.  This doubled the gap between units and those needing them.  Households which spend half of their household income or more on rent reached a new high in 2011, up 14.6% from 2007 and up 49% over the past decade.  These are very eye opening statistics and I hope government officials work hard to make more low-income units available to the poverty stricken, and senior citizens in particular.

Please note that this blog reflects my personal opinion and may or may not reflect the opinion of Hands to Help Seniors and the individual members comprising the Board of Governors.

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View From A Nonprofit Serving Carmel, Carmel Valley, Gonzalez, Greenfield, King City, Marina, Monterey, Pacific Grove, Pebble Beach, Salinas, Seaside And Soledad California

Many seniors hoping to save money on prescription drugs have been ordering them from Canada.  Worse yet, some people have been ordering them from one of the many unknown companies which send out massive email blasts.  Most of these are unreliable companies if not complete scams.  According to  The Wall Street Journal, working with the Food & Drug Administration (FDA) and a number of different law enforcement agencies, a whopping 1,600 fake prescription sales web sites were shut down last week.  Some of them carried the name brand Walgreens and CVS but they had nothing to do with the real drug chains.  They were selling counterfeit prescription drugs, some of which had dangerous ingredients in them.  More than 50 people were arrested and more than $40 million in medicines seized.  Good riddance to them.  Please, be careful and only order prescription drugs from pharmacies you trust.  You could be risking your own life by buying drugs from one of these illicit drug companies.

Please note that this blog reflects my personal opinion and may or may not reflect the opinion of Hands to Help Seniors and the individual members comprising the Board of Governors.

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View From A Nonprofit Serving Carmel, Carmel Valley, Gonzalez, Greenfield, King City, Marina, Monterey, Pacific Grove, Pebble Beach, Salinas, Seaside And Soledad California The controversy continues over veterans coming home from war, only to find out that there is such a huge backlog at the Veterans Administration (VA) that they could wait months, or even years, to receive disability.  This is a sad situation but I have witnessed something similar first hand.  I accept VA benefits to pay for caregiving services at the for-profit company I own, Family inHome Caregiving.  I can tell you from personal experience, their computer systems are extremely antiquated and it's very frustrating trying to get reimbursed for services that we have performed.  I can only imagine how slow the system must feel for veterans, particularly those that are disabled.  The Monterey Herald recently profiled a Pacific Grove man who returned from Iraq in 2005 and found that it took him a year to get approved for disability.  However, I was happy to read that he was able to turn a difficult situation into a good one.   It inspired him to create his own company called Benefits Report Corporation which has an app that allows veterans to have a personalized user friendly look at their benefits.  Check it out at www.benefit reports.com.  "There's 40 million-plus people that this website could help, because it's not only veterans and active duty members.  It's also their spouses, their children, and even their grandchildren," he told a reporter.  He also encouraged any company which offers a military discount to get listed on the service.  What a great idea.  I wish Wolfgang Ward, the founder of this great web site, all of the luck in the world.  Veterans need help wading through the morass of paperwork they must give the government and this site and its accompanying smart phone app can help quite a bit.

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