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It is obvious that the old get sick more frequently and more severely than the young, and 86 percent have chronic health problems of varying degree. These health problems, while significant, are largely treatable and for the most part do not impair the capacity to work. Medicare pays for only 45 percent of older people’s health expenses; the balance must come from their own incomes and savings, or from Medicaid, which requires a humiliating means test. A serious illness can mean instant poverty. Drugs prescribed outside of hospitals, hearing , glasses, dental care and podiatry are not covered at all under Medicare. There is prejudice against the old by doctors and other medical personnel who don’t like to bother with them. Psychiatrists and mental—health personnel typically assume that the mental problems of the old are untreatable. Psychoysts, the elite of the psychiatric profession, rarely accept them as patients. Medical schools and other teaching institutions find them uninteresting. Voluntary hospitals are well known for dumping the "Medicare patient" into municipal hospitals; municipal hospital in turn funnel them into nursing homes, mental hospitals and chronic disease institutions without the adequate diagnostic and treatment effort which might enable them to return home. Persons who do remain at home while in ill health have serious difficulties in getting social, medical and psychiatric services brought directly to them.
Problems large and small confront the elderly. They are easy targets for crime in the streets and in their homes. Because of loneliness, confusion, hearing and visual difficulties they are prime victims of dishonest door-to-door salesmen and fraudulent advertising, and buy defective hearing , dance lessons, useless "Medicare insurance supplements," and quack health remedies. Persons crippled by arthritis or strokes are yelled at by impatient bus drivers for their slowness in climbing on and off buses. Traffic lights turn red before they can get across the street. Revolving doors move too quickly. Subways usually have no elevators or escalators.
Old women fare worse than old men. Women have an average life expectancy of seven years longer than men and tend to marry men older than themselves; so two thirds(six million)of all older women are widows. When widowed they do not have the same social prerogatives as older men to date and marry those who are younger. As a result, they are likely to end up alone—an ironic turn of s when one remembers that most of them were raised from childhood to consider marriage the only acceptable state. The income levels of older working women are generally lower than those of men; many never worked outside the home until their children were grown and then only at unskilled, low-paying jobs. Others who worked all their lives typically received low wages, with lower Social Security and private retirement benefits as a result. Until 1973, housewives who were widowed received only 82.5 percent of their husbands’ Social Security benefits even though they were full-time home-makers.
Text 4What can be inferred from the last paragraph