How we can help others during the holidays with health and well-being needs

It’s the season of goodwill, gratitude, and giving. And in case you didn’t know it, research has shown that being generous to others also can have health benefits for the charitable.

For those interested in helping others with their health, medical, and other needs, here’s a sampling of ideas that may be useful and how to get started.
 

President Biden and the Democrats in Congress overcame fierce opposition this year to pass health care reforms that many patients, especially older Americans, will benefit from in the days to come. Seniors on Medicare, for example, soon will see the cost of insulin capped at $35 for a month’s supply. In 2025, they are scheduled to enjoy a $2,000 yearly cap on their prescription drug costs. And in 2023, the federal government plans to use its enormous market sway to begin negotiating via Medicare with Big Pharma over the prices for a small but expanding number of prescription drugs. Advocates hope this effort will provide a new, big way to slash what we all pay for medications.

Still, in months of negotiations — with opposing Republicans and reluctant Democrats, too — the administration failed to get Congress to provide vital financial support to a giant group struggling with the U.S. health system: home caregivers. These unsung Great Samaritans quietly battle with major life challenges, as the Washington Post reported:

“More than half of Americans 50 and older — 54% — are considered to be caregivers because of the help they provide to one or more people 65 and older, according to the most recent findings of the University of Michigan’s ongoing National Poll on Healthy Aging. Most often, caregiving involves helping with health care, usually through making appointments, talking with doctors, and handling insurance issues, but it can also include assisting with home cleaning, yard work, grocery shopping, meal preparation, banking and bill paying. The survey found that 94% are not being paid for their help, and nearly half (47%) have been helping out for at least three years. The most frequent recipients are parents (45% of the time) and friends, or neighbors (19%). The researchers note … that such support ‘is often essential for aging in place and managing chronic conditions’ — issues that people increasingly confront as they age.”

Alas, as those who have experienced the responsibility of home caregiving know, it can be an isolating, lonely, arduous, and costly labor of love. In the days ahead, individuals can acknowledge caregiving’s extreme stresses confronted by family members, friends, work colleagues, neighbors and others. Give them a call. Schedule a visit. Make time to have a cup of coffee or a meal with them to let them know they are valued, and their struggles are appreciated. Perhaps circumstances will allow you or your church or social group to provide a caregiver or two with a formal or informal, occasional or regular respite, letting them have what for too many is the rarity of time and resources for themselves.
 

For more information on resources for those involved in family caregiving, AARP has a special web page devoted to this topic and accessible by please clicking here.

Reporter Noam Levey, the independent and nonprofit Kaiser Health News Service, and National Public Radio developed an important, tragic series over many months of 2022, detailing the bankrupting burden that tens of millions of Americans suffer with: medical debt.

This scandal of the U.S. health care system afflicts as many as 100 million regular folks, with Levey finding that “a quarter of adults with health care debt owe more than $5,000. And about 1 in 5 with any amount of debt said they don’t expect to ever pay it off.” Their indebtedness to doctors, hospitals, and others in the health system forces far too many to forgo needed medical treatment and prescription medications, as well as causing “families to cut spending on food and other essentials. Millions are being driven from their homes or into bankruptcy.”

Despite the efforts exerted too often by doctors, hospitals, and other providers to squeeze patients — especially the poor, working poor, and uninsured or underinsured — for every penny they possess, collection efforts frequently go for naught. That leaves financial institutions to aggregate, buy, and sell medical debt with what can be cruel abandon for those who find these stressful obligations hanging over their lives. Enter RIP Medical Debt, a New York-based 5013(c) founded by, yes, two former debt-collection executives. They have shown how gifts from the charitable can wipe out substantial medical debts, with a $100 contribution, for example, eliminating $10,000 in others’ obligations.

Officials in Ohio, the city of Toledo and Lucas County, have done this, using $800,000 in coronavirus relief funds to eliminate an estimated $240 million in medical debt for local residents. Television satirist John Oliver has done this, as has political activist Stacey Abrams. So, too, have churches and charities nationwide. Abrams persuaded a political action committee to donate $1.34 million to RIP, which then wiped out $212 million in medical debts owed by 108,000 residents of five southern states. Oliver chronicled how his show’s $60,000 donation wiped out $14.9 million in medical debt. RIP says it has wiped out $7.4 billion in medical debt.
 

For more information on RIP Medical Debt, please click here.

In 2022, Americans learned more than ever about the desperate straits regular folks can be left in after extreme weather and other natural and man-made calamities strike. Since 2010, a novel group of people with expertise in food have tried to ensure that nutritious meals, a fundamental of human welfare, get to those in the worst circumstances. Chefs around the globe have answered the emergency calls and rallied around José Andrés and the World Central Kitchen charity he founded with his wife.

Andrés, who launched his superstar culinary career in Washington, D.C., has defined the group’s global mission: “WCK is a nonprofit organization that is first to the frontlines providing fresh meals in response to crises, while working to build resilient food systems with locally led solutions. Applying our model of quick action, leveraging local resources, and adapting in real time, WCK has served more than 200 million nourishing meals around the world.” The organization has fed the hungry in war-torn Ukraine, inundated Pakistan, flooded Kentucky, wildfire-ravaged California, and hurricane-stricken Florida. The group welcomes volunteers, as well as donations of many different kinds.

To be sure, food insecurity is a persistent problem, not only after disasters and not just in the developing world. As the experts and advocates underscored in the 2022 White House Conference on Hunger, Nutrition, and Health, the first such event in a half century: “Millions of Americans are afflicted with food insecurity and diet-related diseases — including heart disease, obesity, and type 2 diabetes — which are some of the leading causes of death and disability in the U.S. The toll of hunger and these diseases is not distributed equally, disproportionately impacting underserved communities … Lack of access to healthy, safe, and affordable food, and to safe outdoor spaces, contributes to hunger, diet-related diseases, and health disparities …”
 

To learn more about battling food insecurity nationally and in the region, click on these links (they represent a slice of the many charitable groups involved in the struggle): D.C. Central Kitchen, Maryland Food Bank, SOME (So Others Might Eat), Capital Area Food Bank, and D.C. Hunger Solutions.

Technology makes strides by the day, including in the use of virtual reality to help teach aspiring doctors crucial, basic information about human anatomy and physiology. It may sound macabre, but the demand is still big for “anatomical donors” — those who make what Maryland officials describe as a posthumous, selfless gift of their whole body for training medical students, surgeons, first responders, and other health personnel.

The Georgetown University Medical School explains the importance of donor bodies: “When a medical student peers inside a human body that he or she has just dissected, his or her medical training takes a quantum leap from theory into practice. After all, a doctor’s patients are real people. And the only way doctors-in-training and health care professionals get the chance to immerse themselves in the intricacies of human anatomy comes from dissecting an actual body of a deceased person. Simply put, dissection of a human body by every medical student is nothing less than an indispensable part of a first-rate medical education and of medical research, in general.”

The Howard University Medical School offers this insight about the possible benefits to donors’ families: “Burying a loved one has become an expensive commitment during an already trying and emotional time. The cost of a funeral home, a casket, transportation costs, a burial plot and the other numerous expenses associated with the loss of a loved one can be devastating to people of modest means. The Department of Anatomy at Howard University will at no cost pick up the deceased, embalm them, cremate, and return the ashes to the family in a funeral urn. The body will be used to learn anatomy by the very same health professional students who will serve the community after their education.”

This gift has constraints, including personal and religious belief, the common-sense exclusion of those who have died from highly communicable diseases or who were emaciated or obese. The sensitivities of loved ones obviously comes into play, especially because unlike “live” organ donations that many people automatically may think of, anatomical gifts occur after death. Don’t forget that live organ donors also are desperately needed.
 

For more information on making anatomical donations, check with your favored medical school, or you may wish to learn more from online postings by the states of Maryland, Virginia, and the District of Columbia. Those interested in “live” organ donations (hearts, kidneys, livers, lungs, pancreases, and more) can check out another of our firm’s newsletters on this topic by clicking here.

It becomes an instant, urgent need for those involved in terrible vehicle wrecks. Or for those who must undergo major surgery. It is a big, sustained demand for patients with chronic illnesses, including certain cancers. As the American Red Cross advises, “every 2 seconds someone in the U.S. needs blood and or platelets.“

Approximately 36,000 units of red blood cells are needed every day in the U.S. But insufficient numbers of Good Samaritans give blood and do so regularly, leaving the nation’s health care system — and countless patients across the country — in constant worry about supplies.

Not everyone may give blood, and there are eligibility requirements to safeguard donors and the supply. But giving is painless and hospitals, clinics, and blood-banking institutions, with a boost from supporting charitable organizations, try to make the process as easy, simple, and convenient as possible. Those who donate, the Red Cross emphasizes, give a special gift, as “blood and platelets cannot be manufactured; they can only come from volunteer donors,” and “one donation can potentially save up to three lives.”
 

For more information on donating blood, please click here.