The chair of the Senate’s Special Committee on Aging said Thursday there’s a good chance of stopping President Donald Trump’s proposal to eliminate Meals on Wheels, the Senior Companion Program and other Older Americans Act services.
Maine Republican Susan Collins, the committee’s chair, said there is broad bipartisan support for the programs and claimed she has additional clout to save them because she sits on the Senate Appropriations Committee.
She called the Trump-advocated cuts “penny-wise and pound-foolish.”
Not only does Meals on Wheels provide food to the elderly, she noted, but it also gives an increasing number of isolated seniors a rare, regular contact (the driver) who they can see face to face.
Senior isolation is becoming an epidemic, increasing health-care costs for the nation’s elderly through increased nursing home and hospital admissions, Collins said. She added that isolated seniors are more vulnerable to financial scams as well.
Isolation among the elderly has become a serious, pervasive problem that has received little public attention, she said.
“Using resources we have, we can reconnect the isolated and keep people healthy and strong and aid their well-being.”
The Ranking Democrat on the aging committee, Pennsylvanian Bob Casey, attacked Trump’s plan to x-out Meals on Wheels as “misguided.”
Collins and Casey spoke at a committee session where experts warned that one-third of people over 60 have experienced frequent or intense loneliness as the average size of social networks has decreased by one-third since 1985.
Estimates are that about 43 percent of the elderly living in houses, condos and apartments are impacted by severe isolation.