I’ve spent nearly five decades working across financial services, health care, and public  policy. I’ve served on presidential commissions, sat in closed-door briefings with lawmakers, and helped lead organizations working to meet the evolving needs of aging Americans. This crisis didn’t emerge overnight – we’ve seen it building for decades.  

For more than 30 years, commissions under Presidents George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton,  George W. Bush, and Barack Obama all reached the same conclusion: our entitlement  programs were never built to handle a rapidly aging population. There were moments when  real reform seemed possible—when ideas were on the table and momentum was building. But again and again, the opportunities slipped by with inaction. 

Now we’re living with the consequences. By 2036, the population aged 85+ will more than  double. We’ll need nearly one million new assisted living units to meet demand, but we’re on pace to build only 40% of that.  

Most Americans still don’t understand how long-term care works, what it costs, or how to  prepare for it. And the reality is stark: home care now averages $77,792 per year, assisted living $70,800, and a private nursing home room more than $127,000—and those numbers are rising.  

Nearly 70% of Americans turning 65 will need some form of care, but more than 95% of baby boomers lack private insurance to pay for it. Most will rely on unpaid family caregivers or Medicaid, which only steps in after someone has spent down nearly everything they have.  

We are not prepared. Not families. Not the system. Not the economy. Not the country.  

Let me be blunt: the chance to enact sweeping reforms in time to help the baby boomers has passed.  

Structural reforms to Medicare or Medicaid are unlikely in today’s political climate, and  new federal rules are making it even harder to qualify for the latter. Both programs face  long-term sustainability challenges, but broad reform remains politically difficult—even as  insolvency looms. That’s not defeatism. It’s realism. 

So where does that leave us? 

Focus on the possible

We must focus on what’s still possible. And that begins with rethinking how care is delivered, how we define quality, and how we help people afford it.  

First, we need better planning tools. Today, most families make care decisions in a crisis—confused, overwhelmed, and without clear guidance. We must bring the same clarity to  aging that we do to financial planning: nurse-led evaluations, accessible education, and  unbiased support; not just product sales.  

Second, we need to raise the bar on quality. Too often, care is chosen based on  convenience or cost, not standards. Especially in home and community-based settings,  we must define what good, person-centered care looks like and build networks around  those expectations. This doesn’t require sweeping legislation—just transparency, data, and accountability. 

Third, we must confront affordability. The system punishes the middle class: too poor to  self-fund care, too rich to qualify for Medicaid. We need smarter contracting, vetted  provider networks, and eventually, portable, flexible insurance products that fill the gap.  Memory care, for instance, costs up to 30% more than traditional assisted living. Medicare fully covers just 20 days. Most people are left to cobble together care with out-of-pocket spending and fragile safety nets.  

Fourth, we must shore up the workforce delivering care. Care workers are leaving the  industry faster than we can replace them, driven by low pay, high demands, and little  support. Families are filling the gap, providing approximately $600 billion in unpaid care  each year while balancing jobs and other responsibilities. Nearly 60% of employees have  already provided care to a loved one, and most expect to in the future. Strengthening this  workforce—paid and unpaid—must be part of any serious path forward. 

We should also support bipartisan proposals like the WISH Act, which would create a national backstop for catastrophic long-term care events and their associated costs. At the state level, Washington’s WA Cares program offers a modest but meaningful  foundation. These models, paired with thoughtful private insurance solutions, point to a more realistic path forward.  

Moving beyond identifying the problem

We know what the problem is and who it’s hurting.  

What we need now is courage. Courage to act, to innovate, and to demand more from the system. Because the longer we wait, the more people fall through the cracks.  

The current system cannot stretch to catch everyone. It was never built to. And looking  away because the problem is complex, or politically inconvenient, is no longer acceptable. 

The baby boomers are aging into the final chapter of their lives. We owe it to them, and to  every generation that follows, to stop deferring action and start delivering solutions that meet the scale of the crisis. 

The companies declined to disclose financial terms of the transaction, but said it involves a mixture of cash and equity. They said Graphite will to continue operating as an independent product, but with deeper integration into Cursor’s code editing platform. The deal is expected to close in the coming weeks.

Cursor CEO, Michael Truell, told Fortune the acquisition addresses what he sees as an emerging bottleneck in software development.

“The way engineering teams review code is increasingly becoming a bottleneck to them moving even faster as AI has been deployed more broadly within engineering teams,” he said. “Over the past 2.5 years, Cursor has made it much faster to write production code. However, for most engineering teams, reviewing code looks the same as it did 3 years ago. It’s becoming a larger portion of people’s time as the time to write code shrinks. Graphite has done lots of work to improve the speed and accuracy of code review.”

AI code editors like Cursor help programmers while they’re writing code—making suggestions, explaining the function of a particular piece of code, and helping teams move around large projects faster. Graphite, used by companies like Shopify, Snowflake, and Figma, helps teams review changes and decide when code is ready to ship, after its written.

“We focused on the writing side of things. Graphite has focused on the review side of things. We think the two together can make something even better,” Truell said.

Graphite CEO Merrill Lutsky said that the two companies “have an almost identical vision for what the future of software development looks like.”

“Cursor has defined the new way to write code, and we’re defining how you review and merge it. Putting those together lets you build an end-to-end platform,” he told Fortune.

In the immediate term, both products will remain separate, with Graphite maintaining its independent brand. Throughout 2026, Truell said the companies plan to make it easier for developers’ code to connect with the review process, including smarter, more context-aware code review that adapts to how teams actually write code.

Lutsky said concerns about AI-generated code quality have been a major focus for Graphite. “We’ve invested deeply in ensuring that code written with the help of AI is safe and high quality,” he said. “Together with Cursor, we’re going to double down on that and help teams build secure, efficient, high-quality products.”

An end-to-end AI coding platform

The acquisition comes just one month after Cursor, which is valued at $29.3 billion valuation, announced it had reached $1 billion in annualized revenue. The company has seen a rapid rise since it was founded by a team of four MIT graduates in 2022. The company’s AI coding tool, which first launched in 2023, has seen major deployments at companies like Salesforce, which according to Truell said had seen a 30% uplift in engineering productivity from using Cursor.

Graphite is not Cursor’s first acquisition. The company bought AI coding assistant Supermaven in November 2024 and scooped up talent from enterprise startup Koala in July.

Graphite, which Lutsky co-founded nearly five years ago with Tomas Reimers and Greg Foster, raised $52 million in a Series B round in March 2025. The company told TechCrunch revenue grew 20x in 2024 without disclosing absolute figures, and expanded to serving tens of thousands of engineers at more than 500 companies, including customers such as Shopify, Snowflake, Figma, and Perplexity.

Lutsky said the deal offers Graphite the opportunity to build a more unified development platform. “We’ve long dreamed of connecting the surfaces where we create, collaborate on, and validate code changes,” he said, adding that the deal dramatically accelerates that timeline.

The AI coding market is booming

The AI coding market has exploded over the past two years as enterprises rush to adopt AI tools in hopes of productivity gains. The U.S. market for AI code tools was valued at $1.51 billion in 2024 and is expected to reach nearly $9 billion by 2032.

Big Tech companies including Microsoft and Google are automating large parts of their coding. According to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, as much as 30% of the code within the company’s repositories is now written by artificial intelligence while at least 25% of new Google code is generated by AI, according to CEO Sundar Pichai.

Companies are betting that AI coding tools can supercharge software engineers productivity, but early studies have been mixed. A July study by nonprofit research organization METR found that experienced developers using AI tools were actually 19% slower when using an AI coding assistant, even though they believed they were faster. Consulting firm Bain & Company also reported in September that real-world savings from AI coding have been “unremarkable.”

Nevertheless, the deal positions Cursor more aggressively in an increasingly competitive market, with OpenAI, Anthropic, and GitHub Copilot among those vying for dominance in the space. Most of these tools, however, are built on top of the same underlying “foundation” AI models rather than developing their own. Cursor, for example, uses Anthropic’s Claude and allows users to choose models from other providers to power code generation.

While Graphite is also backed by Anthropic, Lutsky downplayed concerns about competing directly with large model providers. “The larger base-model companies are trying to compete across many different verticals,” he said. “Cursor is solely focused on how engineers build with AI, and that focus really sets them apart.”

Truell also brushed off the threat from major AI labs. “Our approach here is to use a combination of the best technology that partners have to offer and then technology that we develop ourselves,” he said. The company has focused on cherry-picking the best available models, supplementing them with proprietary ones, and wrapping everything in what it argues is a superior user interface.

As for the next year, Truell said the company currently has no additional deals planned, with Cursor focused on building out product features rather than eyeing an IPO.

“Our goals for the company are very ambitious over the course of the next decade,” he said. “We think that this is the decade in which coding will be automated, and the way in which professional teams build and deliver software will change across the entire software development life cycle.”

Americans ended up watching the Republican president stand in the Diplomatic Reception Room and deliver 18 minutes of aggressive, politically motivated arguments that misstated facts, blamed the nation’s ills on his predecessor, exaggerated the results of his nearly 11 months in office and amplified his characteristically gargantuan, immeasurable promises about what’s to come.

This was no commander in chief announcing a military action or discussing a critical national issue. It was a politician’s defiant insistence that he’s doing a better job than polls suggest most Americans believe. And the spectacle raises the question of whether network executives should grant airtime to the leader of the free world for a clearly political speech simply because he asks.

“It’s not that the Oval Office and the White House haven’t been used for political speeches before,” said former NBC executive Mark Lukasiewicz, who is dean of Hofstra University’s communications school after more than a decade leading NBC’s special broadcasts, including presidential addresses.

“But, as with a great deal of what Donald Trump does as president, this was outside the norm,” Lukasiewicz said, adding that news executives are reluctant to flout the historical standard that “when the president feels he needs to speak to the nation, you need to let him speak.”

The uneasy dynamics were further intensified because Trump spoke the same day that the Federal Communications Commission chairman, Brendan Carr, told members of Congress that his agency, which has regulatory authority over media companies, is not in fact an independent agency as has been understood through generations of Republican and Democratic administrations. That’s on top of Trump’s penchant for browbeating individual journalists who cover him and suing news organizations to the tune of multimillion-dollar settlements, notably from CBS and ABC.

Lukasiewicz, who left NBC soon after Trump’s 2016 election, said “it is hard to imagine that those factors aren’t on the minds of news executives and network executives making these decisions.”

Networks typically give presidents the benefit of the doubt

The White House did not immediately reply to questions Thursday about the process that led to Wednesday’s address. The networks also did not respond to Associated Press inquiries. Spokespeople at MS NOW and CNN, cable networks whose prime-time programming already is oriented to political coverage, declined comment.

Presidential addresses often begin with the White House press secretary or communications director contacting networks’ Washington bureau chiefs, asking for a specific amount of time and offering a general description of the topic. Lukasiewicz recalled that when President Barack Obama told the nation that 9/11 mastermind Osama bin Laden had been killed on his orders, his aides had told networks the president wanted to discuss a major national security matter.

Such conversations are relayed up to network executives, who must weigh whether to preempt or delay programming, decisions that can affect advertising revenue. Networks typically grant the time, reasoning that they’re relatively rare and historically have involved substantial matters.

Trump, who relishes talking directly to voters via social media and regularly talks to reporters on Air Force One and elsewhere, has made fewer requests for network time than many of his predecessors; he had not asked at all since returning to the White House in January.

Still, it’s not a guaranteed yes, with Obama and President Joe Biden being denied requests in recent decades.

The president disclosed his plans Tuesday on Truth Social, his social media platform. That announcement came hours after his declaration, also on Truth Social, that the U.S. would accelerate its actions against Venezuela and boats the Trump administration insists are running drugs that reach U.S. soil.

Taken together, those posts triggered chatter in Washington and beyond about official wartime actions. Some newsrooms predictably linked his planned speech to his Venezuela commentary. Presidents, after all, regularly make major military announcements in addresses from the White House: John F. Kennedy on the Cuban Missile Crisis, Lyndon Johnson on Vietnam, Jimmy Carter on the Iran hostages, Ronald Reagan on the Cold War and U.S. maneuvers in Latin America.

Presidents also have made plenty of U.S.-centered speeches, many fairly described as a politician pitching his preferred domestic policies with an unchecked megaphone.

Network leaders notably rejected Obama in 2014 when he wanted to talk about immigration policy while Congress was at an impasse over the matter. Lukasiewicz recalled being part of the executive team that rejected Obama’s request to speak during his first term on the Affordable Care Act becoming law.

In 2022, Biden spoke at length on his concerns about American democracy — but several networks did not carry his remarks from Philadelphia. By itself, the topic could be framed as a national concern above partisanship. Biden’s effort, though, was complicated by the fact that he was talking about Trump and Trump’s supporters who ransacked the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, at a time when they were being investigated and prosecuted.

Trump’s purpose still wasn’t obvious hours ahead of his speech

It’s not clear when — or if — the White House shared the substance of Trump’s remarks with network leaders. People familiar with how the process has worked in previous administrations said it would be defensible, since it was Trump’s first address this term, for networks to grant his request even without clarity about the topic.

By Wednesday afternoon and early evening, White House aides and some executive branch agencies had telegraphed to some journalists that the speech would be more oriented to the state of the nation nearly a year into Trump’s presidency — a framing that would still put the speech within historical norms. Trump, however, went beyond those traditional boundaries.

The United States was “laughed at” before he resumed the presidency in January, Trump insisted. He blamed Biden and Democrats for “the worst (inflation) in the history of our country,” but said “everything … is falling rapidly.” Biden-era inflation was not the worst in history, inflation rates began falling before he left office and, though they are now at or much closer to historically routine levels, that still means prices are rising.

The White House also offered charts that only Fox opted to show.

Trump accused immigrants in Minnesota of stealing “billions and billions” of dollars and used the language of war to call Biden-era immigration levels an “invasion.” He claimed he’d secured $18 trillion in foreign business investments to the U.S. when his own White House puts the number closer to half that. He said he scored a landslide in 2024 — despite his Electoral College vote share ranking in the bottom third through 230 years of victorious presidents.

Asked whether the display could give TV executives pause in the future, Lukasiewicz pointed back to business realities.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Those overlaying factors of the incredible pressure that this president can bring, and has shown himself completely willing to bring on these organizations and their corporate parents when he’s unhappy — that’s still part of part of the equation.”