The Fight Against Senior Scams

Scams against seniors have been around for a long time, but efforts to combat them and protect seniors have been meager. That’s changed in the last few years. One act that accelerated protection for seniors was the Center for Disease Control declaring that financial abuse is a hazard to seniors. The CDC defined senior financial abuse and listed the negative consequences of it. Since then, other government agencies at all levels have been more active in preventing senior financial abuse. Details are here.

THE CDC MOVE follows the work of Robert Roush, a doctor who runs the Texas Consortium of Geriatrics Education Center in Houston. After reading about how the parents of a former Securities and Exchange Commission chairman were pestered by aggressive financial brokers, Roush in 2009 started training medical professionals to screen for financial abuse in older patients.

It might seem far afield for a doctor, but he had found that financial woes could have a powerful effect on people’s health. When older people lose so much money that they have to choose between health care costs and routine living expenses, he said, “it becomes a clinical issue.”