One in a series of stories about the history of the UMass Boston Gerontology Institute and its centers and programs as we celebrate the Institute’s 40th anniversary in 2024.
Since its inception in 2006 , the Elder Index™ has served as a powerful tool for elected officials, journalists, researchers, and advocates at the local, state, and national levels to understand the true cost of living for older adults. The online data tool, developed and managed at UMass Boston, calculates how much income adults aged 65 and older need to meet their basic needs—housing, food, healthcare, transportation and more—and age in place, county by county across the United States. The Elder Index also calculates the percentage of older adults in each locale who are struggling financially and offers regional comparisons for living costs and economic security.
Jan Mutchler has managed and produced the index for the last 16 years. Mutchler is the director of UMass Boston’s Gerontology Institute and a member of the gerontology faculty. At heart she is a demographer, a researcher schooled in the study of statistics relating to the changing structure of human populations.
“I always think of my work on the Elder Index as applied demography,” Mutchler says. “But it’s not enough to produce the numbers. We also need to talk about why there are disparities. It has to do with the life course, especially around issues of equity. You have to go back to differences in the schooling people receive, to career opportunities, to women being in and out of the workforce over the years—all of those inequities that land in later life and shape financial insecurity,” she says. Geographic differences are also striking across the country. Along with the more obvious differences in the cost of owning or renting a home, cultural and societal differences become apparent. In parts of the country with lots of union activity, for example, pension accumulations can be much healthier than in places without those kinds of benefits.
“Living costs and inflation rates vary considerably around the country, and that means a Social Security check goes farther in some regions than in others,” a New York Times story noted in 2022. “The Elder Index shows that the average benefit covers 90 percent of living costs in rural West Virginia but just 38 percent in San Francisco.”
Read recent Elder Index reports on economic security
As a tool for advocacy and policy, the Elder Index’s impact has rippled from Boston across the U.S. Successful campaigns to greatly expand access to Medicare Savings Programs in Massachusetts, for example, and to save important property tax relief programs in New Jersey both relied on the Elder Index for critical context and data support. A 2021 report, The Elder Index at Work: How a Data Resource Is Making A Difference in Service and Advocacy for Older Adults, shares additional cases where the index helped advocates working to help older residents facing economic hardship. “In San Antonio, Texas, an agency on aging uses the tool to show how the rural cost of living for older adults in the vast ranching and farming counties surrounding the city isn’t the bargain some think. A legal advocacy organization in Washington State employs the index to show how some lower-income older residents face the economic peril of a ‘Medicare cliff.’ (the drop in benefits when Medicaid-eligible adults age into Medicare, which covers less of their healthcare costs).”
The Elder Index’s roots go back two decades at UMass Boston. Ellen Bruce, then director of the Pension Action Center and former policy director of the Gerontology Institute, and researcher Laura Henze Russell recognized the need for a measure of the true cost of living for older adults. Informed by studies on family self-sufficiency and living wage estimates, they gathered initial funding from local and national foundations in partnership with Wider Opportunities for Women (WOW), an advocacy organization in Washington, DC.
Mutchler joined the work in 2008 when WOW won a large grant to fund production of the Elder Index state by state. The project included training people on how to use the tool to advocate for strengthened financial security among older adults. “In five years, we reached about 12 states, one at a time,” Mutchler remembers. “Traveling across the country with WOW staff and advisory board members was educational. I learned about how people working in the trenches need good tools that they can use and understand and that they can explain to their stakeholders.”
When WOW was dissolved, a collection of funders was assembled to keep the index available and updated. “We have lots of users, and they all expect the tool to be freely available and updated.”
‘Basis for a national discussion’
In recent years, advocates with the National Council on Aging and RRF Foundation have worked to institutionalize the Elder Index as a more accurate measure of economic security than the six-decade-old Federal Poverty Level, or FPL. “We wanted to know what it costs to cover an adequate lifestyle, and to measure that consistently across the U.S. We all know that geographic differences in cost of living exist, but they are ignored by the FPL,” Mutchler says. On average, the Elder Index bar for meeting basic needs is twice the income level of the FPL. “Our goal with the Elder Index is to move the financial security conversation towards adequacy rather than destitution.”
“The Elder Index has provided the basis for a national discussion around equity, aging, and the food, health, and economic security of older people,” says Ramsey Alwin, president and CEO of the National Council on Aging. She thanks Mutchler for her “commitment to shining a light on the real financial struggles that older people are facing everyday across the country.”
The methodology for collecting and sharing the data has evolved over the years, but the intent from the start was to make the index relatively easy to update. Mutchler and her graduate assistants refresh the calculation of the Elder Index every three years, and produce updates using the Consumer Price Index (CPI) during the other years. Some of the component data is available with a simple download. Other cost components, such as healthcare, are more labor intensive to produce. Geographic units change over time—new counties are created, merged, or renamed, and metropolitan areas have changed over time.
Mutchler finds great satisfaction in working with the graduate students. The Elder Index work builds proficiency in working with data, something students learn about in gerontology classes but may not get many opportunities to work with in depth.
Yang Li, PhD ‘20, assisted Mutchler on the Elder Index from 2015 to 2021. His work included tracking down the data for counties, states, and metropolitan areas as well as contributing to a number of Elder Index reports. Li wrote his gerontology dissertation as a three-paper series on financial literacy and works now on geo-social inequalities in aging in Switzerland. “Two skills that I learned from my work on the Elder Index and still use today,” Li says, “are spatial thinking and working with diverse stakeholders.”
Mutchler has been struck by how often she sees the Elder Index referred to in news stories and reports. “The institutionalization of the tool has been great,” she says. Her greatest satisfaction has been knowing that the Elder Index has helped people at all levels of advocacy to make their case for improving older adults’ lives. “People working in the field found something that could convey the truths they know from working with older adults and hearing about their challenges in making ends meet.”
September 30, 2024 at 12:16 am
It was an honor and a privilege to work with Ellen Bruce on the development of the Elder Index and piloting it in Boston and Massachusetts, and with Jan Mutchler as we began to expand it to other states. These leaders and the Gerontology Institute did a great job in moving it to a nationwide effort, and institutionalizing it as a usable, useful tool for the future.
I also call attention to the 2009 policy report, Lifelines for Elders Living on the Edge. This report examines the array of federal and state support programs for elders in Massachusetts. It asks how well the lifelines – the support programs that have been set up to help low- and modest-income elders meet basic needs when costs exceed incomes – work in today’s economy. Which programs are serving elders well? Have they kept pace with inflation? Which lifelines are frayed, or about to rupture? Do seniors know about the programs, and use them when needed? https://scholarworks.umb.edu/gerontologyinstitute_pubs/52/