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This eye disease is age-related, striking a significant portion of senior adults and robbing them of independent living in their retirement years. If you want to avert the development of this sight-robbing disease, called macular degeneration, you are going to have to step outside modern medicine. Eye doctors only have treatment but no prevention for this dastardly eye disease that robs senior adults of their central vision for reading, driving and watching TV.

Federal law has required certain businesses to offer family and medical leave for decades. An increasing number of states have also enacted or considered passing laws requiring businesses to offer family and medical leave. For small businesses, these laws have distinct pros and cons. This article...

Today, U.S. Senators Bob Casey (D-PA) and Pat Toomey (R-PA) applauded the decision by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) to publicly release the monthly list of nursing facilities that are candidates to the Special Focus Facility program. This announcement by CMS comes on the heels of Casey's and Toomey's release of a report on under-performing nursing homes across the U.S. nursing homes.

Clients sometimes ask me whether they can authorize their healthcare agent (named in their advance directives or medical powers of attorney) to, essentially, euthanize them if their quality of life becomes intolerable.  The answer is no, that would be considered murder, at least the way the laws ...

The older the population gets, the greater the potential for elder abuse. States have laws in place designed to combat elder abuse, but some states are doing a better job than others. The consumer finance website WalletHub researched the protections in place in all 50 states and the District of...

We've all heard the advice “It pays to shop around,” but this has never been more true than with the current market for long-term care insurance.  According to the latest industry figures, the spread between the lowest and highest cost for virtually identical coverage was as high as 243 percent....

The number of older Americans with student loan debt – either theirs or someone else's -- is growing. Sadly, learning how to deal with this debt is now a fact of life for many seniors heading into retirement. According to a study by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the number of older...

Social Security survivor's benefits provide a safety net to widows and widowers. But to get the most out of the benefit, you need to know the right time to claim.  While you can claim survivor's benefits as early as age 60, if you claim benefits before your full retirement age, your benefits w...

At the doctor's office and want to know if a procedure is covered by Medicare? There is an app for that. Medicare has launched a free app that gives beneficiaries a quick way to see whether the program covers a specific medical item or service.  The "What's Covered" app allows you to search or...

If your child has reached the teenage years, you may already feel as though you are losing control of her life. This is legally true once your child reaches the age of 18 because then the state considers your child to be an adult with the legal right to govern his or her own life.

The main purpose of a will is to direct where your assets will go after you die, but it can also be used to instruct your heirs how to pay your debts. While generally heirs cannot inherit debt, debt can reduce what they receive. Spelling out how debt should be paid can help your heirs.

Parents want their children to be taken care of after they die. But children with disabilities have increased financial and care needs, so ensuring their long-term welfare can be tricky. Proper planning by parents is necessary to benefit the child with a disability, including an adult child, as...

A bill known as the SECURE Act is currently making its way through Congress and is expecting to become law with nothing more than minor changes.   Key provisions of the SECURE Act include: Increasing the required beginning date (RBD) for required minimum distributions (RMDs) from 70 ½ to 72...

Despite well-publicized cases like that of Terri Schiavo, most Americans still do not have "advance directives" that give caregivers instructions on the kind of care they would like to receive should they become terminally ill or permanently unconscious.  

Nursing home patients are less likely to be subjected to unwanted medical interventions or hospitalizations under a program that offers an alternative to simple advance directives, according to a new study. While advance directives or "living wills" provide general guidance on what type of...

Legendary singer Aretha Franklin was thought to have died without a will, but the recent discovery of handwritten documents in her home are calling that into question. A representative of her estate has asked a Michigan probate court to determine if any of the documents could be considered a va...

In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.  - Benjamin Franklin, in a letter to Jean-Baptiste Leroy, 1789, which was re-printed in The Works of Benjamin Franklin, 1817.   And as most of you are all too well aware, sometimes those two things occur at the same time,...

Medicare's hospice benefit covers any care that is reasonable and necessary for easing the course of a terminal illness. It is one of Medicare's most comprehensive benefits and can be extremely helpful to both the terminally ill individual and his or her family, but it is little understood and un...