Asia is a terrible model for elderly care
Low pensions, patchy health insurance and the increasing reluctance of many to live with their ageing parents condemn many elderly Asians to miserable conditions
Jeremy Hunt is now pointing to Asian culture as exemplary in caring for the elderly, saying he is struck by the “reverence and respect” for older people in Asian cultures as the health secretary. I have lived in South Korea for five years, and I wish I could say I have been struck by the same things. Instead, I’ve been struck by frightening poverty among older people whose living conditions are miserable. It’s a sad irony that for all the supposed emphasis on respecting elders in Confucian societies, so many of them across Asia live in a state barely better than completely neglected.
Take South Korea, for example. Certainly many older people live in clean and comfortable surroundings with their children, but far too many are shunted aside, on their own in cramped, run-down apartments or worse, badly run nursing homes. Earlier this year, one of the leading daily newspapers in Seoul reported the indignities that many elderly Koreans suffer in care homes plagued by filthy conditions including the stench of excrement and body odour. At one institution, patients were regularly bathed out in the open and then forced by staff to walk back to their rooms naked. As the headline in the Hankyoreh newspaper asked: “Where are human rights for the elderly?”
People in Britain had better start asking the same question if the government wants to follow Asia’s lead. Run a Google search on any east Asian country along with the phrase “elder poverty”, and the sickening truth comes to light.
Even in Japan, by far the richest country in Asia, the number living in poverty has nearly tripled since the country’s economic downturn brought savage cuts in welfare assistance. More and more of Japan’s seniors are homeless and malnourished, and as the Washington Post reported – in direct contradiction of the health secretary’s Asian illusions – “Many have been abandoned by children bucking the Japanese tradition of living with one’s elderly parents.”
Across Asia, the younger generations are less willing than before to take in ailing parents, even though middle-class families today are wealthier than in generations past. It would be one thing if east Asian societies had generous pensions and comprehensive universal healthcare coverage, but in fact the health insurance is usually patchy – many catastrophic illnesses are not covered by national insurance systems – and pensions remain low or even non-existent. The same generation that built up east Asia’s “tiger” economies and middle-class societies have been suffering neglect in their advancing years, and the problem is likely to worsen because birth rates have fallen.
In fact, many east Asian policy elites and advocates for the elderly have been looking to Europe’s welfare states as possible models in improving conditions here, though as Europeans have learned, welfare states cost money. South Korea’s president, Park Geun-hye, owes her election last year in part to promises she made to increase the country’s meagre pensions by providing a monthly payment to all senior citizens here totalling about £110 per month. After taking office, Park scaled back the programme, saying the country’s economy could not afford her original plan. This is a tragedy in a country in which nearly half the population over 65 lives in poverty and the suicide rate among the elderly has more than doubled in the past decade.
I would like to think Jeremy Hunt is sincere when he says that he wants Britain to be “the best place in the world to grow old in”. But if he really means this, then he should help Britain find its own suitable path and harbour no illusions about daily life for the elderly in Asia.
Source: The Guardian
Category: Top Story
