THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Saturday, May 6, 1995 TAG: 9505060290
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A9 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY DEBRA GORDON, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Medium: 97 lines
It was 1965, and Jean Jones Perdue, a 62-year-old cardiologist, was in Washington for a historic occasion: to watch President Lyndon Johnson sign into law the country's first government health insurance program for the elderly, Medicare.
Your generation, Johnson told Perdue and the other 199 physicians assembled in the East Room of the White House, will be proud of what you've done in designing this program for them.
At the time, when most Americans had no health insurance, Perdue looked at the plan ``with wonder,'' she remembers.
Thirty years later, attending the just-concluded White House Conference on Aging - her third - the sprightly 92-year-old sported a yellow ``Fix Medicare'' button on her suit and admitted that she and other architects of the plan had been naive.
``We failed in not seeing that there would be fraud,'' she said. ``If we could eliminate fraud, a lot of the worry would be gone.''
It's a failing President Clinton has pledged to fix. During this week's conference, he announced a pilot program in five states to identify, prosecute and punish those defrauding Medicare.
Jean Jones Perdue was reared in Petersburg, the daughter of a country doctor.
Dr. J. Bolling Jones taught his daughter a principle she never forgot: Listen to the patient.
It's one she still follows in her own practice in Miami.
A tiny, birdlike woman with snow-white hair and a brisk walk, Perdue lives alone in an apartment in Coral Gables, Fla. She's had most illnesses and ailments older people have, she says, including a heart attack and a spine disease that nearly paralyzed her last year, but her eyesight is clear, her hearing keen and her mind sharp.
And once you get her talking, the stories pour out.
About her father, who swore that if he couldn't afford to send all eight of his children to college, he would send only the girls. He'd seen enough impoverished widows to know that women needed the tools to make their own living.
About her decision to specialize in cardiology - then a brand-new specialty at a time when few physicians specialized at all - because she remembered her father's frustration at the many patients who died of strokes and heart attacks.
About the era before diuretic drugs were available, when her father had to drain accumulated fluid from patients' abdomens. Her own husband, an obstetrician, died in his late 30s from complications caused by hypertension, a condition that is controlled today with medication.
Perdue has practiced in Miami for 61 years. She was lured there by a promise she made to her brother - then a physician in Boston - that she would look after a group of children with rheumatic fever. Her brother sent them south.
Over the years, as thousands of elderly people flocked to the warm climate and beaches of Dade County, she made issues of aging her passion. She saw them aging, becoming more frail as they grew older. And often, she saw, they were alone, with no one to care for them and few support services to count on.
So she worked to fill the void, starting a program for home-delivered meals and senior centers before any federal funds for such activities were available. Today, she is regarded as an icon in the world of advocacy for the elderly.
She was appointed to the National Council on Aging by President Jimmy Carter. She's a founding member of the Alliance for Aging Research and a leader in the home-care movement for frail elderly.
Her interest in these issues came not from her own years, but from an early exposure to older people.
She grew up in a house where several great-aunts regularly came to visit, staying a month or more. ``I had great respect and love for them, but I also knew they had problems.''
It was an exposure to aging, she says, that few children have today, growing up, as many do, far away from their grandparents. The connection between the generations is crucial, she says. Older people ``all have something to tell you and teach you.''
And so Perdue has a job for older people. She wants them to volunteer in schools. Not high schools or even late elementary grades, but kindergarten classes and first and second grades.
Teachers today are overwhelmed, she says. With average classes of 25 or 30 students, they spend too much time on discipline and have too little time for teaching. But an older person can help, can provide more time for teaching values along with writing and reading. Because without that early grounding, she says, children could be lost to the streets.
``To fight crime, we must begin with the little ones. What happens in their lives depends on them reaching third and fourth grade feeling confident in themselves.'' MEMO: Related story also on page A9.
ILLUSTRATION: Photo
Perdue
KEYWORDS: SENIOR CITIZEN MEDICARE by CNB