U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin is pledging her allegiance to making sure seniors get what they need — and have earned — to live independently.
The Wisconsin Democrat made the vow to representatives of several community aging groups, staffers with the La Crosse County Aging Unit and seniors themselves during a roundtable discussion Tuesday in La Crosse.
The Older Americans Act “is a nearly 50-year-old promise to seniors. Its mission was to allow folks to live independently as long as they could,” said Baldwin, a member of the Senate’s Special Committee on Aging.
The act provides federal funding for social services such as meals, senior centers, caregiver support and job training, among other things, to help older people remain in their homes.
Congress has reauthorized the act several times since its passage in 1965, although that hasn’t happened since 2006, and the act expired in September 2011.
“The reauthorization is long overdue, and we want to make sure it keeps pace with the retirement of the baby boom generation,” Baldwin said in an interview.
“I hope to play a personal role in strengthening it,” she said.
Keeping seniors in their own homes instead of nursing homes and assisted living facilities saves billions of dollars in the long run, Baldwin said.
A hot topic at the discussion: a threatened 5 percent sequestration budget cut in home-delivered and congregate meals for the elderly. That would slash about $18,000 from the county aging unit’s $356,520 budget for the program.
During a recent committee hearing, Baldwin used messages that La Crosse County seniors wrote on paper plates to tell her colleagues how important the meals program is to them.
“Senior nutrition programs treat not just the body but also the mind and the spirit by keeping them in touch,” she said.
One of the paper plate signatories was North Sider Donna Rattle, who also attended the roundtable at the main La Crosse Public Library.
Rattle, who goes to the Harry J. Olson Senior Center five days a week for the meals, said the program is a vital socializing outlet for her, because she plays cribbage daily before lunch.
Another plate signer, Gladys Eternicka of Onalaska, told Baldwin, “I need to say that a lot of younger people, especially politicians, think we didn’t earn what we’re getting.
“They don’t know how hard we worked to get senior centers, but they’re cutting them. That’s not right,” said Eternicka, who also volunteers at Harry J. Olson.
Baldwin agreed, bristling at the use of the “entitlement” label in a pejorative way for benefits that people have earned.
Aging unit director Noreen Holmes said in an interview that she hasn’t made the 5 percent cut in meals, holding out hope that the equivalent of 6,000 meals still can escape sequestration.
“As long as they fix it by the end of the year, we’ll be OK, but I’m becoming less and less hopeful,” Holmes said.
“We’ll continue to serve, and I’ll have to go to the county board to get the OK to pull from a special fund” if the cuts take effect, she said.
Roundtable participants also raised concerns about the fates of Social Security and Medicare in Washington’s budget-cutting dilemma.
Baldwin acknowledged that the country faces “a host of challenges to heal the economy and whittle the debt. Social Security is not the immediate problem.”
Similarly, she said, “We ought to be focusing on changes in Medicare that don’t cut benefits but obtain lower-cost drugs.”
Rollie Solberg of La Crosse pressed for nutrition programs for all ages, saying, “Kids are hungry; adults are hungry. Let’s take care of them. We’ll have to do it anyway if their health suffers.”
