of older persons who want to and are able to become active partners in the maintenance and improvement of their own good health.

Adequate funding of Part F and the extension thereof contained in the Older Americans Health Promotion and Disease Prevention Act of 1991 would provide a comprehensive package of health promotion, disease prevention and wellness activities and education for millions of elders, thereby increasing and improving their quality of life. We have far too many years, cut necessary programs or put too little money into them. These programs are then labled ineffective. Money may not solve all problems but lack of it will surely exacerbate them. Our Nation is aging and still we have not developed and implemented policies that would make the process less traumatic and probably less costly for the elderly and for the larger societies of which they are a part.

The Older Americans Act specifies that there is to be the advocate of the elderly. Disease prevention and health promotion should be viewed as part of these advocacy efforts. Now, income maintenance is perhaps even more important than health issues. Sites that directly or indirectly benefit from OAA funds should be required to furnish information on Social Security, SSI, Medicare, Medicaid and other programs like food stamps and LIHEAP. Equally important, however, there should also be centers of training and consultation on pension issues. Too large a number of older women, particularly newly widowed, discover that their income has declined precipitously after their husbands have died. Many of these women have been kept in ignorance by their erstwhile spouses about their financial status. They do not know whether they are eligible for a survivor's benefit under their husbands' pension rights or whether health benefits are available to them during their spouses' lifetimes will continue or come to an end. Programs to train older persons to ask the right questions while their spouses are still alive and after their demise are essential for the economic security of the elderly, especially for the female elderly. What better place for this information to be conveyed than at a site where issues of health and well-being are emphasized?

An amendment to the Older Americans Act should be added that would reinforce and support such an undertaking.

In my final remarks, I would like to address several issues that are as important as those I have already discussed.

The first of these is the proposals that the OAA programs should henceforth be means-tested. The late Wilbur Cohen used to say that poor peoples' programs make for poor programs. Welfare programs have always been subject to the whims and whimseys of legislative budget cutters. They can be manipulated for all kinds of reasons, because welfare recipients of any age by and large cannot advocate on their own behalf. Their energies are consumed simply in staying alive. By contrast, programs that are available to all enjoy wide-spread support from people of all income and all age groups. Every one has a commitment to a universally accessible program and this leads to participation and involvement and effective monitoring by the population served. Appropriations should be generous enough to assure adequate services for the elderly at home or in the community in rural as well as an in urban areas.

Cost sharing and means-testing would destroy the universal underpinning that now characterizes the Older Americans Act. With adequate funding, the traditional targeting of the poor and the elderly can continue with greater assurance of support from every

one.

I read the newspapers carefully every day. The budget crises of the Federal, State and local governments have become part of my consciousness, but I also recognize that the defense build-up, the savings and loan bail-out and the rapid and focused mobilization for the Gulf War were carried out expeditiously and effectively. Strong leadership is required on the part of Congress to continue and to expand the good work that has been done in the 25 years since the Older Americans Act was passed.

We in the New York State Council of Senior Citizens will support you wholeheartedly in your efforts to do so. Thank you so much for permitting me to testify today.

[The prepared statement of Eleanor Litwak follows:]

S

President

Matthew Schoenwald

LGWU

President Emeritus

Edward F. Gray

UAW

New York State Council of Senior Citizens

218 West 40 Street Room 212. New York, N.Y. 10018 212-921-4143

Good morning, Mr. Chairman, and members of the Sub

Committee, particularly Congresswoman Lowey, whose constituent I am proud to be.

I very much appreciate the opportunity afforded to Be this morning to speak in support of the reauthorization of the Older Americans Act and of the Older Americans Health Promotion and

Disease Prevention Act of 1991. I am the Head of the Retirees

Education Program of District Council 37, American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees; Chairperson of the Sub-Committee on Aging of the New York City Central Labor Council, AFL-CIO; and Executive Vice-President of the New York State Council of Senior Citizens. It is on behalf of the New York State Council that I speak this morning.

The New York State Council of Senior Citizens, as its name implies, is an advocacy organization with some 150 affiliated clubs across the state representing more than 10,000 seniors. We are an important affiliate of the National Council of Senior Citizens. Normally, our activities are confined to issues affecting the elderly and their families here in New York. However, we understand the historic and current importance of the Older Americans Act.

Its passage marked a major commitment to the well-being of the elderly of this country. It asserted that it is the responsibility of the federal, state and local governments to assist "our older people to secure equal opportunity to the free and full enjoyment of a wide variety of services and

conditions". The original Act and the decade immediately following its passage served the important purpose of identifying older persons as an important constituency whose needs had to be addressed and met.

By the late 70's, however, while the OAA remained relatively unchanged, the realities of the groups for whose benefit it had been promulgated changed in significant ways. The elderly were living longer and represented an increasing proportion of the population. Because of this, issues of health began to assume new and proportionately greater visibility. Chronic illnesses like Alzheimer's Disease and Parkinson's Disease became known to ever-increasing numbers of people and terms like the "continuum of care" entered into the vocabulary of all the helping professions.

By the late eighties, we came to realize that "the continuum of care" is precisely that: older people, as they age, and their families require a well-articulated system of interconnected services and sites that correspond to their ever-changing but interrelated psycho-social and health needs. The goal is clearly to insure a good quality of life and to keep the older person functioning at as high a level as possible and to maintain him or her in the community as long

as possible.

Interestingly enough, among social scientists, biological researchers and health professionals, recent decades marked new directions in research which linked health status to social supports which are defined in many different ways