Poverty
The next three slideshows cover some of the problems and stereotypes that the elderly have to face. First, is poverty. Relatively few elderly people in the U.S. live in poverty, although some of the very poorest people are elderly, particularly among minorities. Because older people have for the most part retired from work, their income is based primarily on private retirement programs and government aid. Social Security and Medicare have been especially important in lifting many elderly people out of poverty. Yet people who depend solely on these two programs for income and health-care coverage are likely to live modestly at best.
Social Security is a government provided pension plan, created during Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, and is set up for those over the age of 65 to receive what usually amounts to about 40 percent of their income. Most of the remainder of an elderly person's income comes from investments and private pension funds and sometimes earnings. Low-income households in particular are likely to rely heavily on Social Security.
According to the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), 65% of seniors over the age of sixty-five rely on Social Security for over half of their income. Even with the combination of Social Security and pensions results, most still live modestly in retirement. Almost all elderly are covered by Medicare, which is the government provided health insurance. Just over 60% of people over age sixty-five are covered by private health insurance as well.
The economic conditions of the elderly have improved steadily since the 1970s.
In 1959, 35 percent of all people over age sixty-five lived in poverty. That figure began to drop during President Lyndon B. Johnson's War on Poverty in the mid 1960s when Medicare was enacted and Social Security benefits increased.
By the early 1970s, poverty rates among the elderly had dropped to below 15 percent, and today they hover around 10 percent (9.4 percent in 2006).
Race appears to be much more important than age in explaining poverty among the elderly. Among whites, only 4.5 percent of the elderly reported poverty-level incomes in 2006, compared with 14.9 percent of blacks, 9.2 percent of Asians, and 12.8 percent of Hispanics.
Social Isolation
One of the common stereotypes about the elderly is that they are isolated from human contact. This is not true of the majority of older people. Four out of five older people have living children, and the vast majority of them can rely on their children for support. More than nine out of ten adult children say that maintaining parental contact is important to them, including the provision of financial support if it is needed.
The reverse is actually true, also. Many studies have found that elderly parents continue to provide support for their adult children, particularly during times of difficulty, such as divorce. Most elderly parents and adult children report feeling that the amount of support they receive from the other is fair. Being geographically distant from family members does not seem to be a problem either, since 85% of elderly people with children live close to at least one of them.
Future generations may suffer more from social isolation than do elderly people today. Changing patterns of gender relations, including increases in divorce and a decline in remarriage, may mean that an increasing proportion of elderly people will live alone. A majority of such people will likely be women, given the fact that women on average outlive men.
Among people over fifty-five years, there are only eighty-one men for every one hundred women; for those eighty-five or older, the number of men per one hundred women drops to forty-six. Partly because of the dearth of older men, only 56.6% of all women age sixty-five to seventy-four are married, compared with almost 80 percent of men in that age range.
The fact that women outlive men means that elderly women are more likely to experience problems of isolation and loneliness. These problems are compounded by cultural values that make growing old gracefully easier for men than for women. In U.S. culture, youth and beauty are viewed as especially desirable qualities for women.
Older men, on the other hand, are more likely to be valued for their material success. Graying at the temples is a sign of distinction for a man, rather than a call for a visit to the hairdresser. As a result, elderly divorced or widowed men are much more likely to find a mate than elderly women who are living alone, because the pool of eligible mates for elderly men is more likely to include potential partners who are many years younger.
