Washington Post Review

The following review appeared in the Washington Post on Sunday. It's perhaps a bit overstated, but positive nonetheless.

In The Denial of Aging: Perpetual Youth, Eternal Life, and Other Dangerous Fantasies (Harvard Univ., $25.95), Muriel R. Gillick whacks all the major players orchestrating the Last Dance of America's senior citizens. Medicare is misguided, she argues. Nursing homes are like prisons. Assisted living facilities are too often motivated by greed. Doctors (Gillick is a physician, by the way) are too willing to extend life at any cost. Relatives often have lousy judgment about what's best for a loved one. Even those facing their own finality are too focused on themselves.

In assessing the nation's retirement and health care institutions, Gillick is not the first to see flaws that are ruinous both for the seniors receiving aid and for those of us receiving huge bills for that aid. For example, she notes that while most people want to spend their last days at home, only a quarter of people over age 65 do so. Twice as many die in hospitals, which are so focused on keeping patients alive that they haven't mastered the art of respectfully allowing those near death to leave this world.

For those who need medical care, Gillick would deliver more of it at home, via phone calls, visits from practitioners and other simple measures that have proved effective and efficient. But don't mistake Gillick for a heartless advocate of rationed care. She wants to keep old people alive and well for however long each person can thrive. But she views many efforts to protect nursing-home residents as more of a problem than a solution. By focusing on statistics and standards aimed at ensuring quality of care for these people, she contends, the government is actually prompting these institutions to ignore quality of life.

Gillick challenges Baby Boomers to reengineer nursing homes, first into true homes where elders can thrive and, when necessary, into places providing the care they need to either recover or spend their final days in comfort. More broadly, she challenges her generation to embrace the inevitability of aging and to make the most of it. That would be quite a legacy for the Baby Boomers to leave their children.

--Tom Graham