Ina Jaffe
Ina Jaffe is a veteran NPR correspondent covering the aging of America. Her stories on Morning Edition and All Things Considered have focused on older adults' involvement in politics and elections, dating and divorce, work and retirement, fashion and sports, as well as issues affecting long term care and end of life choices. In 2015, she was named one of the nation's top "Influencers in Aging" by PBS publication Next Avenue, which wrote "Jaffe has reinvented reporting on aging."
Jaffe also reports on politics, contributing to NPR's coverage of national elections since 2008. From her base at NPR's production center in Culver City, California, Jaffe has covered most of the region's major news events, from the beating of Rodney King to the election of Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. She's also developed award-winning enterprise pieces. Her 2012 investigation into how the West Los Angeles VA made millions from illegally renting vacant property while ignoring plans to house homeless veterans won an award from the Society of Professional Journalists as well as a Gracie Award from the Alliance for Women in Media. A few months after the story aired, the West Los Angeles VA broke ground on supportive housing for homeless vets.
Her year-long coverage on the rising violence in California's public psychiatric hospitals won the 2011 Investigative Reporters and Editors Award as well as a Gracie Award. Her 2010 series on California's tough three strikes law was honored by the American Bar Association with the Silver Gavel Award, as well as by the Society of Professional Journalists.
Before moving to Los Angeles, Jaffe was the first editor of Weekend Edition Saturday with Scott Simon, which made its debut in 1985.
Born in Chicago, Jaffe attended the University of Wisconsin and DePaul University, receiving bachelor's and master's degrees in philosophy, respectively.
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Lost birth certificates, name changes and even getting to the DMV can all be challenges when older people try to get a new driver's license in order to vote in states with strict voter ID laws.
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Researchers found that a simple letter to doctors, focusing on their high prescribing rates, reduced their tendency to give risky antipsychotic drugs to their patients, including some with dementia.
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Medicare pays more than $16 billion a year for hospice services. But a new report from the Department of Health and Human Services says hospice patients don't always get the care they're promised.
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Winston and Pansy Green are doing their best to live a normal life. But they've had to adjust to the loss of what Winston calls "little things" day by day and year by year.
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The drugs are intended to treat serious mental illness and are not approved to treat dementia. But the AARP finds more patients living at home or in assisted living facilities are getting them.
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For many Americans, retirement is no longer the long vacation they once imagined. More older adults are in the workforce than ever.
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At least a million more home aides will be needed in the next decade, U.S. statistics suggest. And about a quarter of today's 3 million aides who help older adults avoid nursing homes are immigrants.
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A new study from Human Rights Watch finds the residents are being given the drugs despite an FDA warning that they can increase the risk of death for older people with dementia.
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Too many people with dementia are being given sedating drugs to make them easier to handle in understaffed facilities, a new study finds, despite federal warnings to stop the practice.
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Hundreds of "villages" have been created across the country as a "grass-roots movement on the part of older people who did not want to be patronized, isolated, [or] infantilized."