Former Attorney General Meese returns with long-term care concerns.

Edwin Meese III, who served as U.S. Attorney General from 1985 to 1988 under President Ronald Reagan, has thrown his hat into the long-term care ring. Meese is currently the Ronald Reagan Distinguished Fellow in Public Policy at the Heritage Foundation (www.heritage.org)--a public policy research and education institution--and is a member of the board of advisors at Avalon Technologies, LLC, a healthcare technology company that specializes in communications and emergency call systems for the senior market. Meese spent some time at the April 2004 Assisted Living Federation of America (ALFA) conference in Chicago with Nursing Homes/Long Term Care Management, expressing his feelings and concerns about the past, present, and future of long-term care.

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Meese commented that in his view, "technology can be instrumental in improving long-term care." He also pointed out what he sees to be the two major social problems on the horizon in the United States: "One is education--how do we prepare young people for an increasingly technological society? On the other end, we are going to have more elderly people, and there will have to be facilities to take care of them." Meese said that this is a dilemma that "is going to have a major impact on our politics, including the intergenerational equity issue of who is going to pay for all of this, and to what extent are resources going to be allocated--on the one hand to education, where a lot of the younger people are going to be concerned, and on the other hand to taking care of our aging population." Aggravating the dilemma, said Meese, is that "Social Security and Medicare are ballooning in cost and will increase even further."

Meese spoke fondly of his close friend Ronald Reagan, who at the time was soon to lose his battle with Alzheimer's disease.

--Todd Hutlock, Assistant Editor