The podcast, "Open Forum in the Villages, Florida," features interviews with community leaders and residents to discuss local issues. The show is supported by listeners and offers shout-outs to supporters. Season 4 includes improvements, such as using AI voices for the announcers. In an interview, Jim Bodnar discusses his role as president of the National Retirees Legislative Network (NRLN) chapter in the Villages. The NRLN advocates for retiree issues and meets with Congress members. Jim's focus is on educating residents about important issues. He also talks about the cost of long-term care and suggests considering long-term care insurance or modifying homes for aging in place. He recommends Northwest Mutual Insurance Company for long-term care insurance. The NRLN is active in advocating for technical issues and is particularly concerned about the privatization of Medicare.
Welcome to the Open Forum in the Villages, Florida podcast. In this show we talk to leaders in the community, leaders of clubs and interesting folks who live here in the villages to give perspectives of what is happening here in the villages. We hope to add a new episode most Fridays at 9 a.m. We are a listener supported podcast. You can become a supporter for as little as $3 per month or you can choose to pay more.
To become a supporter go to OpenForumInTheVillages.com and click on support in the black box. There will be shout outs for supporters in episodes. In season 4 we have made some dramatic improvements and changes. First is a clarification of the podcast's title. It is Open Forum in the Villages, Florida to make clear that this is a regional show independently produced for folks who live in Central Florida and the villages areas. Second is a dramatic increase in the use of AI in the creation of each episode.
In fact the show's announcers are now all AI voices including me, Emily. Hope you enjoy. This is Mike Roth on Open Forum in the Villages, Florida. I'm back with Jim Bodnar and we're going to be talking a little bit more with Jim about some of the additional projects he is involved with. I want to talk more about Jim, the National Retirees Legislative Network. What type of issues do you guys work on? It's a national organization. It's a non-partisan, non-profit organization based in Washington, D.C.
And I'm the president of the villages chapter of the National Retirees Legislative Network. The NRLN advocates for issues that impact retirees meeting with members of Congress on a regular basis. My role here in the villages is not so much advocacy although I do go to Washington, D.C. once a year to talk to legislators. My real role here is education. To try to educate folks here in the villages on issues that are important to us. Some of them are issues that the NRLN regularly deals with.
Some are issues that just as retirees we regularly deal with. I do it regularly. I'm a public speaker on a regular basis trying to educate folks on complex issues. So if someone wants to contact you after they listen to this podcast, how do they do that, Jim? They can send me an email at bodnarj.gmail.com. That's my last name, B-O-D-N-N-E-R-J at gmail.com. I would be glad to talk to you. I'd be glad to talk to your groups.
I'm going to be speaking soon at a church. I speak to Rotary Clubs. I speak to lots of different organizations on a regular basis about these very important issues. Jim, what are some of the issues relative to long-term care? Yes, long-term care. My wife and I owned a long-term care business in Michigan for 20 years. My wife's a very smart lady. She was the administrator of our facility. We owned an assisted living facility and a skilled nursing home.
Long-term care is very, very expensive. We all talk about medical insurance and the cost of medical insurance. That's a very, very important conversation, but I don't hear anybody talking about the cost of long-term care. So what do you think the cost of long-term care should be or is? The cost of long-term care, the national average to stay in a skilled nursing home is about $110,000 a year. It's higher here in the central Florida area, in the villages area.
Assisted living is a lower level of care, and assisted living can run anywhere from $6,000 to $8,000 a month. It's going to change. It's going to be different community by community. I'm a huge advocate of long-term care insurance. I'm asked the question all the time. Do I like long-term care insurance? My answer to that is yes, provided that you purchased it 20 to 25 years ago from one of a handful of companies that were smart enough to properly underwrite it 25 years ago and are still in business and financially strong today.
Those policies provided benefits that once they start, many of those policies go on forever. The policies that you might buy today look more like, they're all different, but they look more like a whole life insurance policy where you're buying, in quotes, insurance for a fixed period of time, maybe a couple of years of maximum insurance. I've always said the risk of long-term care isn't that you're age 85 or 90 and you need a skilled nursing home for one or two years.
That's not the risk. The risk is you're 60, 65, 70, and you need long-term care for 20. That's the multi-million dollar risk that very few of us are prepared to meet. Long-term care is expensive. It's a financial planning decision. If cash works real well in your long-term care insurance planning, cash works great if you've got enough of it. But if you don't, you need a backup plan. What's plan B? I'm a plan B guy. What's plan B? Long-term care insurance, if you bought it many years ago.
What are the right companies? Well, I don't want to start pitching any company. Not to pitch the company, but give us a couple of examples. My wife and I were fortunate enough to have some good advice 25 years ago from a trusted friend. We purchased our policies from Northwest Mutual Insurance Company. Great company. Are the policies today expensive? You bet they are. But they're also providing $10,000, $12,000 a month in long-term care benefits for myself and a similar amount for my wife.
Once those benefits start, they'll go on for as long as our disability continues. Yes, it is expensive, but it also provides a safety net below our financial plan to take care of our needs. If we need them. If we don't, we lose. But the backup plan, Mike. The plan C? The plan C, yes. I'm always, I'm a plan A, plan B, plan C guy. Plan C is, the line I always use, is long-term care starts at home.
Think about either building or remodeling your home to make it zero step. Here's what I mean by zero step. People would like to live in their home as long as they can. People would rather bring home health care into their homes rather than living in an assisted living facility. At least many people would prefer that. The problem that we have is we have all of these four-inch steps around our house, at the front door, at the lanai entrance.
You've got four-inch, the garage door, four-inch steps. You can get rid of those steps. There's very easy engineering things that can be done to eliminate them. The interior doors of people's homes are 32, 33 inches wide. They need to be a minimum of 36 inches. Not a problem. Talented carpenter with a sawzall can replace that 33-inch door in a heartbeat. Redrywall, a little electrical work done. Most difficult room in the house is the master bedroom and the master bath.
You need to make sure that you can go from the front door to the bedroom to the master bath all with at least a 36-inch unobstructed track. Once you get in that bathroom, what do you do? We have what I love, garden tubs. Broken hips are great. They're great for the orthopedic folks, but not so good for the seniors. You've got to step over to get into it. You've got to step over to get into it, and then you've got to step out without falling to get out.
What I recommend, if you've got a garden tub, is what I did when my wife and I remodeled our home here in the villages. We ripped out that garden tub. We had the carpenter take the concrete out, the four inches of concrete, all the way down to the sand, take that four inches, get rid of that four inches of concrete, replace it with two inches of concrete, and then turn over the last two inches to the tile guy so that all the water drains to the drain.
You now have a zero-step shower. Don't you dare put a door on it that is less than 36, better to have it about 42-inch entrance. In my shower, I did put up a beautiful piece of glass that really isn't needed because the water goes all over the drain, but it's got a 42-inch entrance into the shower, zero-step. What do you think about those tubs that look like they're three feet tall, and they have a doorway that seals the water so you could fill it with water? They're great.
They're great. They're expensive. They're great. If you do prefer a bath tub rather than a walk-in shower, yeah, they're great. They're pricey. They do take some maintenance. In our business, we had several of them over the years. They work well. Mm-hmm. Okay. Are there building codes that are a problem? I understood that the building codes require these steps that the builder puts in. Yeah. See, I had a builder one time tell me that I couldn't get rid of that four-inch step at the front door because of a flood risk.
This was a builder that had built homes forever. I looked at him, and I said, what did you just say? Did I drop the elevation of the entire house down four inches? I didn't change the elevation of the house. If the house is still four inches up, you just can't see the four inches because I raised the pavers at the front door. I broke the pavers back about 12 foot and reset those pavers, getting rid of that four inches.
You made a 12-foot ramp? A 12-foot ramp that you can't see. You cannot see that ramp. It disappears in the landscaping. It disappears. You don't know when you walk in my front door that you just walked in a four-inch ramp. Mm-hmm. You're exactly right. That's what I did. I created a ramp. Okay. Good. Is there anything that the Retirees Legislative Network does that our folks should be aware of? Yes, they do. They advocate for a lot of very, very technical issues from de-risking pension plans, pension plans that a company has, and they sell them off to a third-party company.
There's risk attached to that. The Pension Guarantee Fund won't provide reinsurance on that risk. They're very active in that area. The areas that I talk about most are Medicare, the privatization of Medicare. The concerted effort that's afoot to get people to give up their Medicare supplements and acquire Advantage plans is effectively privatization of Medicare. We're turning the Medicare system over to for-profit companies that run these Advantage plans. One big area that the NRLN is very active in is to reduce the cost of prescription drugs.
It affects every single one of us. The good news is there's progress being made. Many of you have heard the press stories that effective the first of this year, insulin has been capped at $35 a month, effective January 1st, 2025, total out-of-pocket costs for drugs will be capped at $2,000 a year. We've all heard about the dilemma of Medicare today represents 60 million people, and they can't negotiate with pharma over drug prices. That seems crazy. It seems like there must have been a payoff in there.
I can't comment on that, but I can comment on the fact that effective January 1st, Medicare can start negotiating drug prices with 10 drugs. It's my understanding that list of 10 will increase over the next few years. We have 10 well-used drugs that Medicare can start negotiating for effective the first of January. Let me ask you a different question about allowing fire department to have access to your home when you can't open the door, you're either away or you're falling down inside your home.
I know a couple of people that I know fall. There's a device called a knock box. Great, great question. I had the pleasure to spend time with the fire department and the police talking about some of these non-traditional law enforcement issues. And I've included when I got, I'm not talking, I talk about these issues, not as an expert because I'm not, but the sheriff has told me, look, you want a speaker? Bring us out. We'll tag team a presentation with you.
One of them is a knock box. Let's say you just called nine one one and you're unable to get out of your bed, but you call nine one one, the fire department, the police come to your front door. It's locked. Right. What are they going to do? I can tell you what they're going to do. They're going to break your front door down. You can, you can buy what's called a Knox box. You've seen them on commercial buildings.
They're little secure boxes that hang on the side of your house. You bolt it to the side of your house. You call the fire department. They come out and lock your house key in that Knox box. You don't have a copy to that key. The only person that has the Knox box key is the fire department. Now if you call nine one one, they know that you've got a Knox box. They use their master key to open the Knox box, get your house key, open your door, come into your home.
They didn't break your front door down. A good program. I've got one in my house. The fire department was great. We learned about it through a presentation the fire department made to our Rotary Club. Is it expensive? The Knox box was about a hundred dollars as I recall. The fire department, of course, doesn't charge you to come out and lock your key in it, but they support it very much. There's only one master key for all Knox boxes? I'm not sure how their system works, but it is secure.
I don't concern myself with it, but I do know the fire department can get in my home if they need to. There's no problem like the post office has with their master keys? I have not ever heard of a problem with the Knox box. There's no problem in putting them on private dwellings as opposed to commercial? Not at all. Not at all. The fire department here in the villages strongly encourages it. I had never heard about it, so that's something on the to-do list that everyone's now got.
Yes. Okay. What is your feeling about the AED program? Some neighborhoods here in the villages have AED boxes supported by the villagers in that village. Yes. It's a great program. I'm personally a trained AED responder. We have two of them in our neighborhood. They save lives. If you can get to that person quickly, it can save their lives. The community we live in is only about two minutes from the firehouse, so it's real hard for us to get there, the trained AED folks to get there before the fire department or police department gets there, but that AED will save people's lives.
They also train the first responders on CPR. CPR can save your life. It might save your spouse's life if you know how to do it. Let's talk a little bit more about nontraditional law enforcement. What's going on here in the villages about that? Well, there are a number of topics that I include on my talking point list, but let me talk about one that is so interesting. If you dial 911, if I dial 911, the 911 operator's going to look at the call and say, hmm, interesting, this guy's from Grand Rapids, Michigan.
No, he's not. He lives in the villages. But my iPhone, we all have phones, right? Cell phones. Somewhere else. We brought our phone numbers down here, right? Yeah, portability. And mine is from Michigan. You can download the Smart 911 app off the app store. You go into that app and you put your real information in. Who are you? What drugs are you taking? Who's your emergency contact? What's your spouse's name and phone number? Can you tell our listeners the name of that program again? It's smart911.com or just go to the app store and download the Smart 911 app.
You put it on your phone. Put it on your phone. Username and password, of course. Fill out whatever information you want to provide. And now if you call 911, all of that data through the enhanced 911 system will gravitate over instantly to the 911 operator. So does that include every drug that you're taking? If you put them in there, it will. And I can comment here on the importance of drugs that your emergency people know what drugs you're taking.
Let me give you an example. If you have a stroke and you're unconscious and you're in an emergency room, what's the first question that the emergency room doctor is going to ask you that you're not going to be able to answer because you're unconscious? What drugs are you on? What drugs are you on? Why is that important? Because that doctor wants to know whether they can give you the clot-busting drug. I'm not a doc. I'm not a doctor.
Don't even pretend to be. But I do know that that is a wonderful drug. It's got to be administered very quickly. I think it's like a two-hour window that they have to administer that drug. But they cannot give you that drug if you're on a blood center. So if you're on Eloquist or some other blood center, you've got to be able to tell that physician the drugs that you're on. So if you tell them that you're on Eloquist, what do they do for you? Well, they're not going to give you the clot-busting drug.
There's other treatments that they can provide. But if you are on a blood center, again, this is not physician Jim talking here, but if you are on a blood center, it's my understanding if they give you the clot-busting drug, it could kill you. Again, you have to be able to. And there's some techniques. How do you keep your drugs handy? That becomes the biggest question. You can have a list of drugs in your wallet, but you were in bed when the ambulance showed up and your wallet's in your pants on the hook in your closet.
That's not going to help. No. That's not going to help very much. I've become the new unofficial, unpaid, unsponsored spokesperson. Poster boy. Poster boy. Again, don't work for him. Don't get paid. But a dear friend of mine, a guy that's really smart, a guy named Dave Bear, did a presentation to, he's also a geek, which you probably can call himself a geek, but he did a presentation to our Rotary Club recently on how an iWatch can save your life.
A what? An iWatch. An Apple iWatch. Hmm. How does that work? Yeah. How does that work? Well, he made this presentation to our Rotary Club and I thought, well, geez, that sounds good. My wife and I went out and got iWatches. What the heck? They tell time too, don't they? That's what I figured. I'll never need it for anything other than telling time. That won't work if you have an Android phone. That's probably true. I don't know if there's a similar system for Android or not.
There is an app on my Android Samsung watch that tells you something. But go ahead, Jim. So here's what happened. We got the iWatches a couple months ago. We're in the mountains of North Carolina on the Cherokee Indian Reservation in the middle of nowhere, boondocking off grid in our Airstream. Eleven o'clock at night, my iWatch wakes me up and tells me to seek immediate medical care. Oh, what do you do now? You're in the middle of nowhere.
You're not sure what's going on, although your heart's racing at about 150 pulse. Went to the emergency room. Yep, I was in AFib for the first time. My iWatch told me I was in AFib. I got the medical care I needed. It's an amazing device. It's got a fall feature built into it. A fall feature? Correct. Summer, winter, spring, fall? Summer, winter, spring. Recently, the cleaning lady is in our house. I hear her yell, we're leaving.
So I go run into the kitchen to say goodbye to her. What I noticed is I hit the wet kitchen floor into the face plant on the floor, making sure I'm okay. I was. My iWatch is automatically calling 911. That's pretty cool. The other really, really good thing about any kind of watch is, or particularly the iWatch, your medications. You put all your medications into your iPhone. It syncs instantly to your iWatch. Now you, and you make sure you sleep with your iWatch because if you have to be taken anywhere in an ambulance, you want that on your wrist.
A trick that I learned is because I'm in AFib now, I may be on Eloquist the rest of my life, which is a blood center. You've got to be able to tell the doc you're on that blood center. But how do you do it? Number one, it's on my iWatch. Number two, for $14, you can off of Amazon or lots of places, but Amazon is my go-to place. Go in, fill out your name, your wife's name, indicate that you're on Eloquist on this little tag.
Put a note that prescription drugs are on your iWatch. Put that on your iWatch. If you show up in the emergency room, it's going to tell the doc that you're on Eloquist. Remember, it's important if you're not on Eloquist, if you're not on a blood center, you want the same tag on your watch. Because if you're unconscious, you're in the emergency room, you want to be able to tell that doc that you're not on a blood center so they can treat you with that drug if they need to treat you with it.
So $14, Amazon, pretty cheap. That's a good idea. Pretty cheap thing to do. I just checked my Android watch from Samsung. It's what they call a Watch 4, and it does have a test for, are you an aphrodite? But to do the test, you have to put your finger on one of the buttons for 30 seconds. That might not be good enough if you're asleep. Well, I'm not a geek here, and I get out of my league real quick.
You can do the same on an iWatch. You can manual test, but all I can tell you is at 11 o'clock at night, my wrist is going crazy and vibrating, and my watch is talking to me, and you wake up, and you're scared because you've never been an aphib. You don't even know what it is, right? Okay, so here you are. You're in the middle of North Dakota someplace. You don't know where the medical clinics are.
You don't know where the urgent cares are. What did you do? We knew we were in Cherokee, North Carolina on the Cherokee Indian Reservation. We were able to go to the Cherokee Emergency Room on the reservation. Got wonderful care. I'm blessed to have a cardiologist down here in the villages who took two or three calls from that cardiologist at the emergency room during the day. My cardiologist down here gave him his advice on how to treat me.
I'm thankful for the fact that I've got a medical team here that I've put together, and I'm thankful when I travel that I can go to any emergency room that I need to and not worry about what the cost of that emergency room is going to be. That's right. That's because you have a Medicare Part G or F. I've got a Medicare G plan, but the G or the F are the two that I strongly recommend.
If you want a full explanation of what those plans are, listen to the prior episode that we do. Jim, let's talk about a couple of the nontraditional law enforcement programs that are available here in Central Florida. Tell us about the Supta County Sheriff's DREAM program. There are several programs. The DREAM program, the SENT program. The DREAM program involves folks that wander. I don't know the technology, but in my mind it's something similar to an Apple AirTag.
But the loved one can be given a device. As I understand it, it's free of charge by the Supta County Sheriff. It will help track that person if they're a wanderer. There's another really cool program that I didn't know anything about until I interviewed the police. It's called the SENT program. If you have a loved one that might wander, the police department, the fire department will come in. They will rub the loved one with a cloth and put that cloth into a sealed container.
If the sheriff ever had to bring out search dogs, there's a SENT in that container. Pretty cool idea. I had not heard about it until the police and fire department shared it with me. We have these vials in the refrigerator for the sheriff. Yes. What I recommend is I keep a 10-page or so word doc that always tracks my medical history and my drugs. I put one of those plastic sleeves on my refrigerator with a clip.
That says Jim and Sue Bowdener, emergency medical information. The fire department or the police department could grab that whole file right out of that sleeve and have both my health care and Sue's health care, my wife's health care, at their fingertips. Probably for the last topic that we have here in the show, let's talk about understanding Medicare fraud and identity theft. How does that work and how do you protect yourself against it? It's a complex issue.
It truly is. Number one, if you download my Plan for Life checklist, the first thing I recommend, there are three credit bureaus. You can permanently place a credit freeze on each of those three credit bureaus, and the forms are in my Plan for Life checklist. Fill in the blank forms. You send those forms to the credit bureaus. They'll send you back a random ID number. The only way you will unlock that credit report is if you can provide that random ID number.
It's real easy if you go to Verizon and you're getting a new cell phone. They want to do a credit check on you. No big deal. They say TransUnion. You go in. You unlock TransUnion for two days. They run their credit check. It drops back down. Nobody gets into that credit file, including the bad guy and including yourself, unless you can produce that random ID number. It's a great first step. Is that better than having something like LifeLock? Well, LifeLock, if you want to spend a couple hundred dollars a year, whatever it is, I'm not sure what the cost is, to trip the bad guy as they're running out of the bank, LifeLock will do it.
If you want to lock the front door of the bank, put a credit freeze on your file. There's other really interesting things. Credit cards. We all have credit cards, right? How many times a year do each of us get our credit cards periodically? Swipe. Somebody steals it, yeah. Steals it. Yeah, they steal your credit card and they charge stuff that isn't you. It happens. It's happened to me. You can go to the alert section on your credit card website and set up an alert and have a text message sent to you, not for every transaction over $10, every transaction over 0 cents.
You don't want to do $10 because the bad guy will go in and test your account for $8.43. And now you're going to get a real-time text message every time that card is swiped. My wife loves it because I can follow her around town. That's interesting. I thought you were going to say $1,000. No. Not a penny. Not a penny. Zero. Zero. Anytime anyone swipes your card, you get a text. That is fantastic. It's free. Easy to do.
Another thing that people should know is property theft. I really like your house. I think I'm going to quit-claim your house to an offshore LLC that I just set up. How do you stop that from happening? Well, if you go to the Sumter County website, there's an FBI notice on that website that talks about the fastest-growing identity theft or theft in the country. It's this mortgage theft. Sumter County, and I think Lake County has it, too.
You can go and a couple clicks of a button, and you can tell Sumter County what name, who you are, what's your phone number, what's your email address. Now, if any illegal document hits the public record with that name on it, you're going to get a phone call or an email from Sumter County telling you that somebody just recorded a quit-claim deed on your property. Does it prevent it from happening? No. But do you find out about it today rather than five years from now? Yes.
Sumter County strongly recommends it. Like I said, I think Lake County does, too. But it's really easy. It took me five minutes to register on it. But identity theft's a big deal. We all see it every day in our lives. Good, Jim. Let's take a couple of seconds here and listen to an Alzheimer's tip from Dr. Craig Curtis. This is Mike Roth and Dr. Craig Curtis. We're talking about Alzheimer's disease. Dr. Curtis, when an individual decides to participate in an Alzheimer's study, are there any inpatient days required? Not in any of the studies or research that I do.
But there are research trials out there where patients can spend time in an inpatient setting while taking part in research. But here in the Villages, I am not aware of any. With over 20 years of experience studying brain health, Dr. Curtis' goal is to educate the Villages community on how to live a longer, healthier life. To learn more, visit his website, CraigCurtisMD.com, or call 352-500-5252 to attend a free seminar. I'm back with Jim Boser. And, Jim, you wanted to say something.
Yeah, if I could, Mike, there's one thing that I'm very, very passionate about. One of the things is my efforts to work with the National Retiree Legislative Network. But I'm also very active with Rotary. I'm on the volunteer member of the Board of Directors of Langley Health Services. Langley provides medical, dental, and behavioral health care to low-income folks here in Central Florida. But we created a really unique program in partnership with a group called Sunshine State Veterans Fund and a couple of Rotary clubs.
We created this designated fund, and we funded this account to provide dental services to low-income veterans. Here is the reality. United States military veterans that are in financial need don't have access to dental services unless they're 100 percent disabled or were prisoners of war. Langley is a federally qualified health care organization, and they can provide dental services to anyone who's low-income on a sliding scale. So that veteran can be provided general dentistry at a cost of about $50 for general dentistry.
We created this fund through Rotary and Sunshine State Veterans Fund and a few other nonprofits. We reduced that cost from $50 down to $5, and the fund pays $800 toward the set of dentures. We have served 500 veterans here in Central Florida since the inception of the program and done about 20, 25 sets of dentures. It's an exciting project. We're very proud of it. Langley is the health care provider. They have medical locations in multiple cities here in Central Florida.
We're very proud of what we're doing. Good. Jim, if someone wants to contribute to Langley, how do they do that? They can send me an email at bodennerj.gmail.com. Spelling your last name for our listeners. It's Bodenner, B as in boy, O-D-E-N-N-E-R-J at gmail.com. If you'd like to support the Veterans Program and you do write a check, I can give you an address when you call. You want to note that it's a donation to the Smiles for Veterans Dental Program.
We're doing good work, and we want to continue to do so. Great. Jim, thanks very much for joining us today. Thank you. Remember, our next episode will be released next Friday at 9 a.m. Should you want to become a major supporter of the show or have questions, please contact us at mike at rothvoice.com. This is a shout-out for supporters Tweek Coleman, Dan Capellan, Ed Williams, Alvin Stenzel, and major supporter Dr. Craig Curtis at K2 in the Villages.
We will be hearing more from Dr. Curtis with short Alzheimer's tips each week. If you know someone who should be on the show, contact us at mike at rothvoice.com. We thank everyone for listening to the show. The content of the show is copyrighted by Rothvoice 2023. All rights reserved.
