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'The best we can hope for are policy proprosals that meet the needs of older people today and help people get ready for later life.' Photograph: Sheer Photo, Inc/Getty Images

Lord Filkin , chair, Centre for Ageing Better: six quick thoughts on what I would want to see from each political party:
• Set out a vision to maximise all the benefits of a longer life
• Face the facts of our biggest social change and how different England will be in five and 10 years time
• Recognise the asset of more older people and think how we can utilise this
• Listen to people more, be more focused on the public and more joined up!
• Assess the increased needs and cost of health and social care and have an honest conversation with the public about why we will have to spend more and the choices of how we pay for this
• Set out how the NHS will change from a hospital-centric system to a community based one

David Oliver , president, British Geriatrics Society: I would like to see:
• An honest commitment to increasing NHS/care funding to 11% of GDP in line with comparable countries and a plan for raising the money
• An increase in the ringfenced funding for social care to reflect current demand
• Transportable, equitable entitlement to social care in the same way the NHS is accessed
• An end to any further top down reorganisation of services
• Allowing NHS England to get on and be the system leader free of political interference from No 10 and the Department of Health
• A ban on spending any further public funds on management consultancy
• A realistic plan for delivering single transportable electronic records that can be shared across primary, secondary, social and mental health – no more fiascos like the £12bn spent on the failed connecting for health project

Athina Vlachantoni , Centre for Research on Ageing: the parties’ manifestos often resemble simple and short-term solutions to complex and long-term challenges. Raising the real value of the state pension, or maintaining benefits which help older people pay for heating, are welcome solutions but I would also like to see some innovative, long-term thinking which goes beyond the political cycle.

Andrew Kaye , head of policy and campaigns, Independent Age: I think the best we can hope for are decent policy proposals that don’t just meet the needs of older people today, but help people across their life course to get ready for later life. So for example, policies that enable people to work flexibly, take a graduated approach to retirement, have a mid-career check looking at their skills in midlife … But policies that also help encourage people to save where they can, and access high-quality information and advice to consider their needs post retirement.

Gillian Connor , head of external affairs, Hanover: we’d like to see an acknowledgement that housing has a key role to play in wellbeing – particularly in health, wealth and social terms. Housing is still the poor relation in debates about social care and health – despite the key role it plays in facililtating independence.

Chloe Carter , policy and advocacy manager for health and social care, Red Cross: We’d like to see a further shift from reactive to preventative health and social care … The Care Act places a new legal duty on local authorities to make sure that preventative services are available locally. This sends a clear message that prevention is not discretionary, and it’s excellent that the duty had cross-party support.

Claire Turner , head of ageing society policy and research, Joseph Rowntree Foundation: I think the short answer to has the situation changed to … not much! I do think the ageing population debate has a higher profile than ever before but I’m not sure the message has reached the mainstream. It still feels like ageing experts taking to ageing experts about older people – how do we widen the debate to get a wider group of people (inside and outside government) to care about this stuff? This is not to say that lots of activity isn’t happening. A year is not much time to see any big shifts in health and social care, housing etc.

Connor : While there has certainly been a clear focus on social care in 2013-14, and many aspects of the Care Act are extremely welcome, particularly its focus on prevention, I share others’ concerns that innovative, sustainable and holistic solutions seem beyond reach – due to difficulty, political will etc. Public finances continue to be squeezed and we have already reached the point where short-term fixes and tidying around the edges will not deliver the dramatic change that is needed and that was urged by Lord Filkin’s report …

Kaye : The recent Global Age Watch index now reports the UK is 11th in the global league of nations in terms of being a good country in the world to grow older in. In 2013 we were 13th. Progress? Debatable.

Gigi Eligoloff , editor, Gransnet: what is exciting is seeing the next generation of over 50s come of age. The baby boomers were very vocal about social change in the 60s and 70s and it’s these same people we’re seeing getting engaged in the older adult focused debates today. They are not going to sit back and knit their way through older age. Sites like ours and the many others show that older today means tech-savvy and vocal, politically engaged and often with strong social consciences … so watch this space.

Turner : It is tempting for policymakers to postpone thinking about ageing in favour of more immediate crises. However, in the focus on more immediate concerns, government is in danger of overlooking a key challenge for future generations. Of course, getting ready for ageing is about all of us – individuals, families, communities, employers – but if the government wants individuals to get ready for ageing, it needs to lead the way.

Eigoloff : The discussion of older adults and their issues really seems to be gathering momentum. But we still need to stop lumping everyone over the age of 50 together. It’s not one group with the same needs. What we see is that most gransnetters are still working, some are part-time, some are full-time, some are looking after their grandchildren, some are carers and some are still thinking about their next move. And that move is unlikely to be “retire and start gardening” so they need more choice, and they need political parties to start talking with them. Not at them.

Kaye : The first 100 days of the next government is the critical period. Get our issues on the next government’s agenda then, when there will be intense discussions around the 2016-19 comprehensive spending review, and we’ll start making progress.

Discussion commissioned and controlled by the Guardian, hosted to a brief agreed with British Red Cross, PA Consulting, Independent Age and Hanover. Funded by British Red Cross, PA Consulting, Independent Age and Hanover.

The myth of Bill Cosby has woven itself into our culture, making it difficult to believe something so sinister. Illustration by Paige Baumgartnerfor Guardian US Opinion

But we do not live in that world. In this one, we simply don’t want to believe women – or, really, we don’t want to have to believe women, because doing so might, ever so slightly, complicate our own lives and our own preferred narratives.

It would be mighty inconvenient to have to see the world as it is.

Rape is an appalling crime. It’s difficult to wrap my mind around it, really – that a person can feel so entitled to the body of another that the person forces himself inside another person. Rapists take something so intimate – access to your insides – something to which they have no right. They violate your bodily sanctity, your emotional sanctity, your trust in your insides and everything outside, your confidence that your body is your own or that your trauma requires or deserves justice. Crime hardly feels like an adequate word.

Yet rape is pervasive, and nobody is truly immune from the threat of it.

There is so little justice to be found when it comes to sexual violence, be it in the courts or the court of public opinion. Instead, we have an excess of testimony from all manner of victims and a passionate chorus of disbelievers all too eager to tear apart their stories.

Perhaps it is so difficult to believe rape victims because it means facing the fact that at least one of every five women we meetin the United States alone – and maybe more, because many women never report – has been a victim in that way. Perhaps we cannot conceive of so many people enduring such a terrible violation and our so-called justice system doing almost nothing about it – and that’s why we demand evidence and testimony and unimpeachable victims … and still, that is not enough. Perhaps it is easier to believe that all those people are lying – that they have some ulterior motive, some nefarious agenda – than it is to believe how many other humans must be capable of such atrocity. Perhaps we contort ourselves into finding any explanation other than the most obvious one because the visceral truth of rape – what people we know either perpetrated or endured – is unbearable.

Perhaps I want to believe that the people around me are such great believers in our shared humanity – so tender of heart and soul – that they just cannot fathom that anyone but the greatest of villains could bring themselves to do such a thing to another person. But I am finding it more and more difficult to give people that benefit of the doubt.

The accusations of rape that have quietly followed Bill Cosby for so longare apparently finally catching up with him. So manywomen have come forwardwith their storiesthat we can no longer look away, even if we want to. But we shouldn’t look away. We shouldn’t need so many women to tell such similar stories to believe. We shouldn’t be filled with so much doubt. One accuser should be more than enough.

NBC shelved the showCosby was developing for the network. Netflix has postponedairing a recently filmed comedy special. TV Land is no longer airingreruns of The Cosby Show. In the court of public opinion, that might feel like justice, but such consequences feel more like gestures. Perhaps such gestures of belief are all his accusers will ever have. But being believed shouldn’t have to be enough.

We should have never ignored the accusations against Bill Cosby(which his lawyer says Cosby “does not intend to dignify”), but it’s difficult to believe something so sinisterabout a public figure as beloved as Bill Cosby. He gave us Fat Albert, The Cosby Show and A Different World. We ask ourselves, How could a talented comedian – a family man, a philanthropist – also be a serial rapist?

Cosby and other men accused of rape rely on us asking those questions. But those questions are a privilege not accorded rape victims, who have to go to extraordinary lengths to be heard, let alone believed – whether or not the men they are accusing are world-famous and wealthy.

Rolling Stone this week published a harrowing storyabout Jackie, a young woman at the University of Virginia who offers her accountof being brutally gang raped during a party. The last assailant she describes in her story of the hours-long assault was a classmate she recognized, and he hesitated – so one of the other assailants said, “Grab its motherfucking leg.”

That haunts me. It makes me ill. “It”.

I am haunted – plagued, really – by memories of when I was “it”, so much nothing, a skin-bag of girl bones on a dirty floor being tormented by terrible boys. I was “it” while they laughed and drank and took and broke me. I was “it” when they told anyone who would listen the story of what they had done and people began to look right through me.

Too many of us have been “it”. Too many more of us will become “it”. Too many of us will continue to look anywhere but at the ugly truth.

But that’s how rape, and rape apology, works: she wasn’t a human, that wasn’t her leg, her experience wasn’t “the truth”. In her story, after Jackie’s assailants left her visibly beaten and bloodied – and worse – her so-called friends finished the assault on her, in a sense: they openly agreed not to take her to the hospital, so as not to jeopardize their standing on campus. It was inconvenient, that situation; the truth of her was uncomfortable, their bloodied, bruised and near-broken friend.

This is the ugly truth. Rapists make us less uncomfortable than rape victims. Predators demand so much less than victims; they aren’t as inconvenient. They don’t bleed or hurt or reveal their gaping wounds. If we don’t doubt them, we do not have to doubt ourselves. That’s why the charm of Cliff Huxtable – a fictional character – is more important than the words of so many women. That’s why a university’s patina of prestige and gentility is more important than the words of any number of young women who have been raped on that campus.

“It”.

May we be haunted by that word and the woman who was forced to bear it until she, and every rape victim, is seen, heard, believed.