Nearly half a million elders living alone in California cannot make ends meet, lacking sufficient income to pay for a minimum level of housing, food, health care, transportation and other basic expenses, according to a new policy brief released in February by Steven P. Wallace, PhD, of the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research, and Susan E. Smith of the Insight Center for Community Economic Development in Oakland, Calif. Among the findings are that older renters were more than twice as likely to be economically insecure as those who owned their homes and had paid off their mortgages (70.4 percent of older single renters were insecure, compared with 34.4 percent of homeowners without mortgages); and about three-fourths of Latino elders who lived alone, and almost half of those who lived with only a spouse, could not cover their basic costs of living.

The findings in the policy brief are based on the Elder Economic Security Standard Index (Elder Index) for California, a tool that measures the actual cost of basic necessities for older adults in each of California's 58 counties. The Elder Index is viewed by many as a more accurate measure of economic security than federal poverty level (FPL) guidelines, a standardized national estimate that does not take into account the cost of living in high-cost states such as California. The release of the brief occurred at a state Assembly hearing and was covered widely by the media. For the Policy Brief see http://www.healthpolicy.ucla.edu/pubs/publication.asp?pubID=323 (full press release at http://www.healthpolicy.ucla.edu/news_02242009.html), and for more on advocacy about the Elder Index see http://www.insightcced.org/index.php?page=cal-eesi .