Aged

Many large employers are struggling with the obligation to cover the rising medical costs of retirees, but last year officials in Michigan found a way to save at least $40 million on care for retired teachers and other public-school workers: Send the bills to Washington.

Taking what they described as a significant step to protect senior citizens, state regulators have persuaded the biggest seller of annuities in California to promise to stop targeting the elderly with pitches allegedly designed to sell them pricey policies that could never pay off. The agreement between Allianz Life Insurance Co.

Robert Mannheim was stunned when he found out that strangers wanted to lend his mother in West Los Angeles money to buy her a $2-million life insurance policy and pay her premiums. The deal got better after two years: She would sign over her death benefits to investors and collect $200,000. The idea of leveraging the value of her newly acquired insurance into a big cash payoff tickled Selma Mannheim, a child of the Great Depression, who knows the importance of having money in the bank.

The broken rib could have been a disaster for Claire Soroko. She had been saying goodbye to friends Christmas Day when she stumbled from an outdoor step and banged into an iron handrail, breaking a bone in her chest. Afterward, she couldn't clean, drive or even dress herself. "I really don't have anyone," says Soroko, a Park La Brea resident in her 70s. "My daughter and son-in-law are very busy. I couldn't ask them to come and stay with me."

One piece of the puzzle is missing from the aging in place trend -- healthcare. The nation's healthcare system is simply not designed to help seniors remain living independently, says Laura Gitlin, director of the Center for Applied Research on Aging and Health at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia. "We know what helps people," she says. "What helps them age in place is not covered by insurers at this point."

The "aging in place" movement is fueled by changes throughout society. Services linked to retirement communities -- official or otherwise -- are not the only options for older Americans who want to remain in their homes. Networks of services: Across the nation, business people are forming networks, called Aging in Place Councils, in various cities to link seniors to services.

Many government and private organizations offer information and assistance for seniors who want to remain in their own homes. Supportive services programs for naturally occurring retirement communities (NORC): * United Jewish Communities offers a description of the role of supportive services programs and a list of 40 specific communities that are part of its nationwide Aging in Place Initiative: www.norcs.

A scarcity of paid caregivers means that, in the future, older people may have to band together to help each other. Older Americans are already pitching in to care for their more frail or even older counterparts as either paid or volunteer workers. That's because finding younger people to work as caregivers is becoming more difficult.

In his 1985 breakout novel, "Less Than Zero," Bret Easton Ellis, then all of 21 years old, created young, jaded Angelenos who just didn't care about anything: They recounted cocaine scores and semi-anonymous sex in the same tone with which they lamented their fading suntans. That ennui became Ellis' literary signature, and as he began to grow up in public, he became known as a photogenic and glamorous figure who liked booze and excess. More than two decades later and almost four years after returning home to L.A., the city in which he grew up as the offspring of affluent Goldwater Republicans, Ellis himself claims to be in a phase in which he just doesn't care about anything -- a middle-aged wrinkle on the old Ellis ennui.

A former female wrestler who terrorized Mexico City as the "Little Old Lady Killer" was sentenced to 759 years for killing 16 elderly women. Juana Barraza, 50, admitted killing four women over age 70 out of anger toward her elderly mother. She said she did not kill the others, but prosecutors say her fingerprints matched those in the other cases. Barraza was captured in 2006 leaving the house of Ana Maria Reyes, 82, who had been strangled with a stethoscope. Mexico has no death penalty or formal life imprisonment.