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As part of his on-going efforts to reform the nation’s health care and insurance system, President Obama will hold a town hall meeting this Wednesday in Annandale, Virginia. The debate over health care reform has generated a tremendous amount of debate with Republicans warning against the taxing of employer-provided benefits and accusing the White House of being “socialist.” But health care costs are so high in the nation that two thirds of all personal bankruptcies are filed as a result of unexpected emergency health care costs. The problem could severely worsen as millions of “Baby Boomers” reach retirement age stretching the current system to its limit. In a new book called Caring for our Parents, veteran journalist Howard Gleckman writes about the painful challenges of caring for our elders as well as younger people with disabilities. Through his own personal experience of caring for his father-in-law, and researching how others care for their parents and loved ones, Gleckman, in his own words, “discovered the irrational and disjointed ways we deliver and pay for … assistance, and how our dysfunctional system often drives people to get the wrong care, in the wrong place, at the wrong time.”

GUEST: Howard Gleckman, author of “Caring for our Parents: Inspiring Stories of Families Seeking New Solutions to America’s Most Urgent Health Crisis,” senior researcher at the Urban Institute, formerly a visiting fellow at the Center on Retirement Research at Boston College. He has covered economic and fiscal policy, personal finance, and health care for 30 years

Find out more at www.caringforourparents.com