Seniors to Set Agenda at Session in Capitol

State legislators have adjourned for a recess, but next week senior activists from across California will fill their desks to pore over dozens of proposals concerned with the lives of aging citizens.

The California Senior Legislature, an elected body organized just like the real thing, convenes in Sacramento on Monday for its 17th annual session. Volunteer senior legislators will grapple with issues such as physician-assisted suicide, organ donation, transportation and the skyrocketing cost of pharmaceuticals--a particular hardship for seniors on fixed incomes.

By Thursday, the group will whittle its ideas to a top 10 priority list that members will shop around to real legislators. If history repeats itself, many of the policies hashed out by these activists will become law.

“Their track record speaks for itself,” John Kehoe, executive director of the California Commission on Aging, said of the senior legislators, who are all older than 60. “In the last three or four years they’ve been achieving a 70% success rate with their top 10 proposals translating into bills that the governor signs.”

The California Senior Legislature was created in 1980 by former state Sen. Henry Mello (D-Watsonville), a longtime proponent of senior issues, with the help of Neel Buell, now 83, an Orange County activist who heads the emeritus program for senior education at Coastline Community College in Fountain Valley.

Last year, proposals from senior legislators on elder abuse, veterans with Alzheimer’s disease and long-term health care for the elderly all became law, Kehoe said.

Their success, Kehoe said, is due in part to experience. It also makes simple political sense.

“Eighty percent of people over 60 vote,” he said. “The politicians want to listen because they feel that a system that has peer groups selecting those who represent them has quite a network into the senior community.”

John Kumbera, 76, of Brea heads the group’s joint rules committee this year and has drafted a proposal that would require the state Department of Aging to train volunteers to advise seniors on their financial affairs.

“Of all the seniors that die, 25% to 30% have their wills and business in order and the rest do not,” said Kumbera, a retired salesman. “It just leaves everything in a terrible mess.”

Under his plan, information would be given in group sessions at senior centers on issues such as wills and power of attorney, he said.

“Myself, I am just getting a trust going now,” Kumbera said. “If I died, my children would have to pay a lot of tax for me. They would have some problems.”

Another hot-button proposal deals with physician-assisted suicide. Rosemarie Barker-Millsap, a Laguna Hills senior senator, will champion a version of right-to-die legislation that she hopes will be viewed as a softer approach than previous plans.

Dubbed End-of-Life Choices, her proposal would ensure that terminally ill patients have a say in a full range of so-called comfort care, including hospices, pain management and physician-assisted suicide.

Barker-Millsap, 68, volunteers as a certified ombudsman, surveying conditions at long-term care facilities, and has spent hours at the bedsides of terminally ill patients.

“A few have told me, ‘I wish there were a way that I could legally end my life when I want to,’ ” Barker-Millsap said. “I say to them very honestly, ‘Maybe not in your lifetime, maybe not in mine, but in our children’s lifetime this will come to pass.’ ”

Barker-Millsap, a retired aerospace engineer, said, “We are living longer, and that’s OK if the life is fine.” But if terminal illness sets in, she said, she wants competent adults in California to “at least have a choice.”

Jack Sherrill, 86, of Leisure World retired mid-session from the Senior Legislature this year because of ill health, but his proposal nevertheless will make it to Sacramento without him next week. It would allow patients to decide whether they want life support or sustenance once they are in the hospital.

Many seniors neglect to complete a living will before they are hospitalized and, under current law, cannot make the decision to decline life support once they are admitted, said Anna Boyce, 67, a longtime senior legislator from Mission Viejo who supports Sherrill’s proposal.

“People should be able to decide once they’re in there whether they want treatment or not,” she said. “Don’t you have some control over your body?

“Here’s the cold part: It’s profitable for them to keep you alive.”

Boyce and San Diego County senior legislator Lee Smith co-authored a proposal to encourage organ donors by waiving their driver’s license fees. That proposal calls for a more noticeable marking to identify donors than the tiny pink dot that now graces licenses.

Many organs are lost because rescue workers and hospitals do not determine that someone is a donor in time to use their organs, Boyce said. When her husband passed away, a nurse came to her with the question just in time.

“Fortunately, both his eyes were given, one to a 14-year-old diabetic and one to a 35-year-old mother of three,” Boyce said. “I go around bragging about what my husband did. I say, ‘My husband is looking at the world through these people’s eyes.’ ”

After a day of meetings Monday, this year’s group will be sworn in Tuesday by Chief Assistant Secretary of State Robert Jennings. Mello is among those scheduled to address the group, as is Sen. Mike Thompson (D-St. Helena), chairman of the Senate Budget and Fiscal Review Committee.

All sessions of the California Senior Legislature are open to the public.