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Show Senior Citizen news May is Older Americans Ameri-cans Month and growing old may be getting better, if one can believe statistics. statis-tics. The 33 million Americans Ameri-cans over 60 years of age today are better off economically and are better bet-ter educated and more skilled than Americans over 60 have ever been in the past. Their health is better, thanks to advances in medical science and to coverage by Medicare and Medicaid. As Older Americans Month is celebrated this May, young and old have reason to take heart. The young, because the condition condi-tion of the elderly should be brighter still when they pass the threshold. One of the purposes of the observance is to make all Americans aware of significant changes taking place in the population of the country. Many of the changes which occurred in the social and economic structure struc-ture of American life years ago are now appearing in elderly population characteristics. charac-teristics. For example, the median medi-an number of school years attended for today's elderly is 10.3 years. But those just passing over the 60-year threshold have a median of 12 years school attendance. In a decade and a half, this will be the median for all those over 60. (Just two decades ago the average Older American Ameri-can had only an 8th grade education.) English language difficulties diffi-culties are fading from the aging picture. The number num-ber of foreign born elderly elder-ly has been decreasing since about 1960, and this movement will accelerate. The occupational history his-tory of the elderly population popula-tion is also changing, white-collar backgrounds are increasing. Unskilled and farm-labor backgrounds back-grounds are rapidly decreasing, de-creasing, whereas blue collar backgrounds maintain main-tain a fairly constant level, at about 50 percent of elderly males. Women's occupational history is undergoing rapid rap-id change. Many more than in the past have participated in the labor force for significant numbers num-bers of their pre-retirement years. One important import-ant result is that more women are receiving Social Security and private retirement plan pensions on their own, not simply as the spouse of a retiree. A broad uptrend in the financial wellbeing of the elderly has resulted from increases in Social Secur- ity payments, wider private pri-vate pension coverage, Medicare and Supplemental Supple-mental Security Income. These have given the elderly greater financial independence. Changes of living to very old age have greatly increased in this century. There are 17 times as many persons over 85 in the country today than there were in 1900. And as a group, Older Americans are undoubtedly undoubt-edly more active, healthier, health-ier, and have more to offer their communities than their predecessors. |