W: The Planner, The Chosen (4 page)

Another group of hands went up with a lot more questions.

“How can the money go into a common fund? How can we know which part is ours? How can we access ours?”

Janice waved her hands to quiet everyone down.

“Does anybody in this room remember Bernie Madoff?” Everyone nodded. “What about the financial crisis of 2008? Does anybody remember that?” There were more nods.

“Bernie Madoff ran a huge Ponzi scheme that defrauded investors out of their life savings while he and his family lived large. Madoff is serving 150 years in prison, but he is by no means the only example; I could give you forty or fifty examples right now of dishonest investors who have stolen Americans’ lifesavings. The Dodd-Frank bill was passed in 2010 to set up safeguards and protections for banks, financial companies and all security companies to make sure that we would never again have another financial meltdown. But we realized after a couple of years that it just does not go far enough. We’ve got greedy people in this country hoarding millions of dollars in their personal accounts, and other greedy people siphoning off that money and stealing it for personal gain. In the meantime, we have millions of people who barely have enough to get by.  Through the Retire America Fund, all of that will change.  Never again will a dishonest investor be able to abscond with a pension fund. Never again will a senior be stripped of his or her life savings and left with nothing because some fast-talking con man took the money. And never again will we have an elite few living in wealth and luxury while others can barely scrape together the money to pay for their medications.”

Kris was grateful for the lunch break, both because it gave her a chance to get out of that hard, uncomfortable plastic chair and because she was out of the training. Janice might have a wealth of information on both the current problems facing seniors and the Smart Seniors’ program, but she was not an interesting trainer, and questions annoyed her.

Kris looked at her watch; she had time to go down and meet with the benefits coordinator. She really needed to get her benefits set up—mainly she really needed to get into her new housing. Money was running low; she was in the motel only until the end of the week, and she needed to be moved by then or she would have to stay with her parents, which she did not look forward to doing.

She made her way down the hall and, by asking directions, finally came to the room where the benefits coordinators had tables set up. After thirty minutes of waiting in a line that did not appear to move, Kris wondered if she would have to come back at another lunch break, but, finally, an additional benefits’ specialist returned from her lunch break to take the person ahead of Kris. That put her second in line to talk to somebody. Forty-five minutes had now passed—there was no hope of getting anything to eat before she went back to class, and she certainly did not want to repeat this exercise the next day, so she continued waiting until, at last, a benefits’ coordinator summoned her to take a seat in another small plastic chair situated across from his position at one end of a folding table.

The unsmiling civil servant barely looked up, “Name?” he asked while staring at a screen.

“Kris Mitchell—Kristina Mitchell.  I am a new hire….”

“Mitchell, Kristina. W Section—Level I Planner, Division 1. I see you here. I need your ID please.”

The clerk took Kris’ ID and then proceeded to ask her a lot of personal health questions while filling out the information on his screen. He took down information on her number of dependants—none—and household pets—also none.

“As part of your benefits package, you are being assigned housing in the FE section.  You will be assigned to Division 4—unmarried federal employees living alone. Has this been explained to you?”

“Yes,” Kris nodded as she answered. “It was explained to me as part of my hiring process.”

“The position is salaried—no over-time pay. You will be paid semi-monthly. You need to complete these forms,” he handed her a stack of letter-sized papers, “to set up your deductions from your paycheck. Your housing at FE is an automatic deduction. The rest of your salary will be direct deposited to the credit bank in your community.”

“Wait, do I have to open a new bank account?  I would rather keep my own account with my current bank. I’ve been with them a long time, and I know all of my passwords…” Kris smiled when she said it hoping to establish a little bit of a friendly rapport, but the clerk did not smile or respond.

“We don’t care whether you keep your account or not.  However, your compensation is not coming in the form of U.S. dollars—you are being compensated in community credits for use in the Smart Community where you have been assigned housing….”

Now it was Kris’ turn to interrupt. “What! Wait; I can’t be paid in credits. I have to be paid in money—regular U.S. money.” She was gesturing with her hands as if to try to explain to this obviously clueless person in front of her what constitutes regular U.S. money.

“All employees in this program are paid exclusively in credits. That’s how this works. The Smart Communities have a credit bank. The website address is on this sheet of paper,” he highlighted a page with the address. “This number here,” he wrote a number alongside it, “is your FE number. Within forty-eight hours you need to log on to the website, enter your number, and set up a log-in ID and password. When your credits are deposited, the system will automatically generate an alert which will be sent to your federally-issued secure email address that new credits have been issued. If there are any changes to the credits being deposited, you will be issued an alert for that also.  By logging in, you can check the status of your credits to see what you have spent and what you have left.”

“That’s not going to work for me. I have bills to pay. I have credit card bills that I have to make payments on. I have expenses. I need to opt out of this.”

“There is no opting out. The forms I just gave you are for deductions. The deductions are for the bills you want to have automatically deducted from your gross pay. Fill out the forms completely with the name of the creditor, the full account number and the amount that you want deducted from your check to go to each creditor. The balance will be deposited into your credits account for use in the community.”

Kris stared at him wondering if she looked as confused as she felt. “So I fill out one of these forms for each creditor that I need to pay? And I fill in the amount that I want deducted? What if I need to change the payment amounts? I was hoping to get some of the small ones paid off and then work on the larger amounts….”

“You can make changes—within the coordinated election period. During the coordinated election period, you can change the amounts of the payments that are going to creditors, add creditors, remove creditors….”

“The coordinated election period,” Kris repeated, while thinking that it was very ironic that she was now stuck in a system modeled after the Medicare program that the government supposedly wanted to fix.  “How often is that?”

“Every six months a new coordinated election period opens for fifteen days. Any changes that you want to make can be made only during that time. Is there anything else?” The clerk actually looked up at her this time. Kris glanced down at her watch. Class would start again in less than five minutes.  She was still so confused, but there was no more time to ask any questions. Grabbing the forms, she stuffed them into her purse and headed back to her class. Janice glared at her as she walked in about two minutes late.

Kris finished the rest of the day sitting quietly and making notes without asking any more questions. The strong anti-capitalist tone of the sessions bothered her some—more than she cared to admit. On the other hand, she needed this job, and she could not afford to get into a personal disagreement about how the world ought to be. Maybe just sitting quietly and listening and learning was her best course of action for a while.

The next morning’s training focused on the psychology of aging. Janice had a Power Point presentation and some videos which outlined the major psychological and social problems faced by retirees. Kris had always enjoyed psychology; she hoped to find this training session a little more engaging.

“You know,” Janice began, “in the U.S. we think of everything in terms of money. How much does it cost? How much do we save?  But when we are talking about retirement and the needs of our senior population, there are many issues that have been completely ignored with regard to health and safety.

“According to statistics from the American Psychological Association, twenty percent of people over fifty-five suffer from a mental disorder. When we look at nursing home residents, that number is actually two-thirds. But less than three percent of this population seeks help from mental health professionals.

“Twenty percent of older Americans suffer from depression, and older Americans account for twenty percent of all suicides. In fact, older Americans have the highest suicide rates of any population group—even higher than teenagers. Substance abuse is a huge problem for this demographic—we estimate that seventeen percent of older Americans abuse alcohol or drugs. What we find is that as people age, they often become lonely, either as a result of a loss of a relationship through death or divorce, or they experience the depression that can come with retirement.  When these life-altering changes occur, people who once just drank socially often become heavy drinkers.  Alcohol abuse is one of the eight leading causes of death among seniors.

“Eighty-five percent of seniors suffer from at least one chronic illness. About fifty percent suffer from arthritis, forty percent have hypertension, thirty percent have heart disease, and twelve percent have diabetes. Ten percent have had a stroke—and that is really significant considering the debilitating effects of strokes on their victims.

“Additionally, this is an age group that is facing major life adjustment changes—the end of a career, the loss of a spouse, the loss of independence, declining health. An interesting study recently found that seventy percent of primary care visits were motivated by a psychological stressor. Possible stressors include panic, anxiety, depression, stress and adjustment disorders. Increasingly, with the changes and cuts to Medicare, seniors have a harder and harder time finding a primary care physician who can meet their needs. As the senior population expands and the number of primary care physicians shrinks, this problem will only escalate.

“We also find that the senior population tends to not take care of themselves as well as they did when they were younger. Many of the chronic diseases in this population are behaviorally-induced. Poor diet, inactivity, and alcohol and tobacco increase the likelihood and severity of a chronic disease.

“That’s one of many areas in which the Smart Seniors community is really going to excel. Each community has its own clinic staffed with a primary care physician, plus one PA for every one hundred residents and a full nursing staff. No appointments are necessary. Any senior can walk in at any time and get the treatment that he needs right then. There are no premiums, no deductibles, no additional insurance, no out of pocket. Each senior will have two mandatory health exams per year.  Any special needs can be referred to a specialist.

“But Smart Seniors goes way beyond just providing a doctor. The communities are designed specifically to deal with each issue that goes to the heart of what we have just been discussing. Communities are designated for marrieds or unmarrieds so that married couples will live in one community and unmarrieds will live in another. By living in close proximity to other people in similar situations, seniors can avoid the feelings of loneliness and estrangement that they often experience. And because we are screening the residents carefully, we are making certain that the seniors in each community are in similar age groups and come from similar religious and social backgrounds. These people will walk into the new community with a ready-made group of prescreened friends just waiting for them, so there is never any reason for anyone to feel isolated.”

A hand went up in the back, “Isn’t that kind of discriminatory? I mean—to put people from the same religious and social background in the same community—it sounds kind of like segregation to me. What about diversity?”

“Actually, the communities are racially diverse. But they are comprised of people sharing common social and religious identifiers because seniors have a hard time adjusting to new situations. Think about it—we promote diversity in schools so that children will experience many different lifestyles and ideologies because those experiences will help to make them more rounded adults.  For seniors, the challenges are quite different. The isolation, anxiety and panic which are an unfortunate part of aging are often associated with being cut off from what has been safe and familiar. We want to create a protected, emotionally-comforting environment where every person can thrive.

“We also want to create a physically healthful environment. Each community features a dining hall with menus specially prepared by a nutritionist. Each meal is designed to be appetizing as well as properly balanced.  By providing seniors with a proper diet, we believe that we can reduce some of the chronic diseases which we tend to observe as they continue to age.”

Another hand went up, “What if they don’t want to eat at the dining hall? Is there a grocery store or something in the community?”

“There are stores and shops in the community, but there is not a grocery store, per se.  The units do not have kitchens, so there is no food prep going on in the units themselves.”