Reports are that former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle from South Dakota is President-elect Barack Obama’s choice to head the Health and Human Services department. Daschle would take that position at one of the most critical times in the U.S. history of aging services where there is so much opportunity for change.So is there anything from Sen. Daschle’s past that gives us insights into how he might approach long-term care financing and services?’ Check out these opening comments he made at a Capitol Hill press conference in 1999. A decade later could an administration that pledges change and innovation, turn to innovation in long-term care financing?’You wouldn’t appoint Tom Daschle to be secretary of Health and Human Services if you weren’t serious about making healthcare reform a priority,’ said Drew E. Altman, president of the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation in an interview with the L.A. Times.

Sen. Daschle’s opening statements at a 1999 press conference:

Bette Davis once said that it takes courage to grow old. And I believe that anyone who has had the experience of watching their parents struggle with the challenges of age and the extraordinary physical and mental pressures that older people feel, understand what it is to be courageous as one grows old.

We believe that you have to be courageous in Congress as well, in dealing with the problems of our elderly and recognizing the importance of a population that will continue to be larger and larger as a percentage of our country and its demographics. That is why we’ve been concerned over the last several months about the inaction we’ve seen in the Congress on an array of issues that we believe are critical to addressing the needs of this nation when it comes to the elderly.
And the list continues to grow as we look at failures on the part of the majority in addressing the needs of the elderly this year and the needs of the elderly as the baby boomers grow older: They failed to enact the Medicare prescription drug benefit. They failed to establish a national family caregivers support program to help families with long term needs. They failed to establish long-term care tax credits. They failed to strengthen the retired health coverage. They failed to combat crimes against seniors. And they have failed now to authorize the Older Americans Act.

There is an array of failures there that I think point to the need for greater bipartisanship, greater efforts to reach to common ground and to build a consensus in addressing the problems of the elderly.