In response to a caller request in January, today’s show focuses on issues that older adults face in Dane County and beyond. According to the Dane County Area Agency on Aging, the number of folks 65 years and older is forecast to grow by more than 30,000 in the next fifteen years. Statewide, the senior population is growing rapidly, especially in urban areas. Yet the number of licensed nursing beds and the available workforce for nursing homes is declining. 

To talk about these issues, we’re joined by two guests, Jodie Castaneda and Addie Costello. They discuss issues like transportation, isolation, changes to local funding and Medicare, and the racial and ethnic inequalities in our area. 

Castaneda works at NewBridge, a non-profit agency which supports older adults living in their own homes or apartments in Madison and Monona. NewBridge provides case management to help their clients access benefits like Medicare/Medicaid, decrease isolation, find transportation, and more. 

Local journalist Addie Costello, started reporting on long-term health facilities after getting a tip from a community member about a long-term care facility. For the past year she’s been reporting on county-owned nursing homes, some of which are being bought by private companies as county boards are selling them saying they can’t afford to keep them up. 

She says that Wisconsin has some of the most publicly run, county operated nursing homes in the country and that these facilities have better services and better compensation for staff than privately-owned ones, according to Care Compare.

Jodie Castaneda is the NewBridge Case Manager Supervisor, and she has been in this role since the four Madison area senior coalitions merged in January 2019. She has been an older adult social worker/case manager in Madison/Dane County for almost 20 years and prior to that worked with the elderly in nursing homes and with home health care. 

Addie Costello is WPR’s Mike Simonson Memorial Investigative Reporting Fellow embedded in the Wisconsin Watch newsroom. For the last year, she’s covered Wisconsin’s long-term care Medicaid programs, assisted living, and nursing homes.

Featured image courtesy of Sara Gabler/WORT.

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