1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910781383203321

Autore

Lynch Frederick

Titolo

One Nation under AARP : The Fight over Medicare, Social Security, and America's Future / / Frederick Lynch

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Berkeley, CA : , : University of California Press, , [2011]

©2011

ISBN

1-283-27797-2

9786613277978

0-520-94890-4

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (287 p.)

Disciplina

306.3/80973

Soggetti

Senior power - Political activity - United States

Older people - United States

Baby boom generation - United States

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Description based upon print version of record.

Nota di contenuto

Front matter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction: Not Going Quietly -- 1. Boomer Basics: Generation, Culture, Demographics -- 2. Old Age in a New Society -- 3. Boomers' Senior Power Potential: From Social Protest to Self-Preservation -- 4. Crash Landing for a Self-Critical Generation -- 5. Not Your Father's AARP: Bill Novelli Builds a New Boomer Brand -- 6. AARP Turns Fifty: The Battle for Health Care Reform -- 7. You Can't Always Get What You Want: Me, We, or AARP? -- Appendix: Methodological Odyssey -- Notes -- Index

Sommario/riassunto

This book provides a fresh and even-handed account of the newly modernized AARP (formerly the American Association of Retired Persons)-the 40-million member insurance giant and political lobby that continues to set the national agenda for Medicare and Social Security. Frederick R. Lynch addresses AARP's courtship of 78 million aging baby boomers and the possibility of harnessing what may be the largest ever senior voting bloc to defend threatened cutbacks to Social Security, Medicare, and under-funded pension systems. Based on years of research, interviews with key strategists, and analyses of hundreds documents, One Nation under AARP profiles a largely white generation,



raised in the relatively tranquil 1950's and growing old in a twenty-first century nation buffeted by rapid economic, cultural, and demographic change. Lynch argues that an ideologically divided boomer generation must decide whether to resist entitlement reductions through its own political mobilization or, by default, to empower AARP as it tries to shed its "greedy geezer" stereotype with an increasingly post-boomer agenda for multigenerational equity.