Meryl Comer, President , Geoffrey Beene Foundation, Alzheimer’s Initiative

Award-Winning Journalist Shares Her Alzheimer’s Experience

Meryl Comer, an Emmy award-winning business reporter and broadcast journalist with more than a decade of “on the job training” as a caregiver for a family member suffering from Alzheimer’s, issued a wakeup call to the baby boom generation when she spoke to a Nashville audience at a breakfast meeting on the cusp of National Alzheimer’s Awareness and Family Caregivers Month in November. 

Comer, president and CEO of the Geoffrey Beene Foundation Alzheimer’s Initiative, is the primary caregiver for her physician husband who has suffered from the disease for the last 16 years since he was diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer’s at the age of 58. She issued a warning and a plea to the audience to recognize the consequences of a major shift in life expectancy. “It’s the real pig in the python,” she said.

Urging the audience to get prepared for inevitable consequences of the tsunami of baby boomers reaching 65, Comer said that, as the holder of two long-term care policies, “the only thing I haven’t insured are my body parts!”

Comer’s story of her experiences, “Mine is The Family Next Door,” is chapter 3 in a newly published book, “The Shriver Report:  A Woman’s Nation Takes on Alzheimer’s,” edited by Maria Shriver.

In welcoming the group, host Chuck Pruett, managing partner of event sponsor Pruett Financial Group of Northwestern Mutual, said, “The reality is that even the most carefully thought-out retirement plan can be derailed by a long-term illness or disability. One major health episode changes it all in a heartbeat.”

Comer noted that even with the long-term care policies she carries, out-of-pocket expenses for her husband’s care are $140,000 a year, in addition to the $182,000 she spends on a secondary caregiver to relieve her for a 12-hour shift every day and $40,000 a year for a case manager for her husband’s disease.

“I hope my story becomes a wake-up call to my generation to take action before they get sick, run through their savings with out-of-pocket medical expenses and burden their children in a way unacceptable for most of us,” she said.

Long-term care offers a broad range of services available to individuals who have lost some level of independence and need help with daily activities. It is one of the biggest issues facing baby boomers today and an increasingly critical component of any financial security plan.

The statistics are sobering. The segment of the population who are 65 and over will increase by 15 percent from 35 million in 2000 to 40 million in 2010 and then to 55 million in 2020. About 75 percent of individuals over 65 will require at least some type of long-term care services during their lifetime, causing huge financial implications for their families. In one out of every five households in the United States, there is a family member involved in the caregiving of a person age 18 or older, and the average caregiver is 46 years old.

Comer was among the first female broadcasters to specialize in business news as it relates to public policy. For 18 years, she wrote and moderated “It’s Your Business,” a nationally syndicated debate program on economic business and political issues. She was also one of the first women in syndicated business news to share a wake-up call to the baby boomer generation about the dark side of the “longevity revolution.”

With the incidence of Alzheimer’s up 46 percent “and bound to get worse,” Comer pointed out that the United States is the only country without a national strategy for dealing with dementia care. She predicts this situation it is about to become the “biggest women’s issue since breast cancer.”

She added, “Women in pain are the ultimate desperate housewives.”

Comer’s personal experience of the emotional, physical and financial strains on families whose loved one’s illness includes a memory deficit such as stroke, depression, Parkinson’s or Alzheimer’s is chronicled in her forthcoming book, “Slow Dancing with a Stranger.” In the book, she urges that “we must mobilize and push for a national research commitment to end Alzheimer’s that matches the magnitude of this disease,” one that traps the caregiver with a diagnosis that destroys more lives than just the patient’s.

Her comments are particularly poignant in light of the recent recommendations from the chairs of the White House Debt Commission, which included slashing Medicare benefits and extending the working age to receive Social Security benefits just as baby boomers are on the precipice of retirement. The recommendations from the leadership of the group, officially called the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, met with resistance from within its own 18-member commission before the information was even officially made public. Whether or not any of the recommendations are adopted, the report underscores the ever-increasing cost attached to longer lifespans.

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