People who have difficulty with bathing, dressing and walking across a room require our health-care system to a greater extent. Those who have trouble performing such activities have higher rates of hospitalizations, longer hospital stays, and more physician visits than those with no disabilities.

While such essential care would not include the cost of visits to the doctor, our data suggest that people who receive additional assistance would be less likely to be hospitalized, and that could conceivably allow us to keep our health care-costs down while still providing for our frail elders. As our population ages, there will be more need to find economical ways to care for this group, and adequate home-based care could be both less expensive and more effective for some than full-time nursing-home care.

Nearly 30 percent of adults aged 75 and older have one or more disabilities in performing basic activities of daily living. Additionally, of the more than 2.3 million older adults with severe disability, 84 percent receive some form of public health insurance. We wanted to find out what might be done to help this group more effectively.

What this suggests is that if a homemaker or personal assistant helps these frail elders for a few hours a day, they would be less likely to experience medical conditions such as hunger, dehydration, falls and skin problems that occur when disabled older adults do not receive needed help with daily tasks. As our government is under increasing pressure to develop fiscally feasible solutions for caring for disabled older people, we feel providing disabled elders with adequate home-based care should receive further attention.

During the last three to four flu seasons, the public health department has had difficulty in obtaining the flu vaccine.

We're also having difficulty with people paying their utility bills,