CaféAuLait;6712440 said:
Let elderly people 'hurry up and die', says Japanese minister
Let elderly people 'hurry up and die', says Japanese minister | World news | guardian.co.uk
"Hurry up and die" you "tube people" and those who "dodder around", the government can't afford to pay for you anymore! I've seen people point to Japan's HC system as an example for ours. Yet they have had to double taxes to pay for the elderly and are now hoping they hurry up and die because the old are a drain on the system.
That is so un Japanese. I imagine the Japanese people are ashamed of him. The Japanese students that come here are shocked when they visit our nursing homes. They keep their elderly at home with them. And 67 or 68? Japanese live a lot longer than that. Every Japanese person I have ever met and I've met hundreds, have revered their elderly. Going to have to ask Tachi what he thinks about this when he's here next month.
http://www.businessweek.com/
"Itoko Uchida, 82, was counting on the nephew she raised to support her in old age. He refused, forcing her to pay for a sponsor to join the 420,000-long queue of Japanese waiting for a nursing home bed.
With no relatives willing to help, the Tokyo widow had to spend 710,000 yen ($7,600) on a professional service to be her guarantor and assist with an application to a nursing home, she said. An erosion of traditional Confucian values in Japan means fewer elderly are being cared for at home by relatives -- a fact neither Uchida nor Japan’s government were fully prepared for.
Japan, with the world’s highest proportion of retirees, can’t build nursing homes fast enough. By 2025, one in three citizens will be 65 years or older from 12 percent of the population in 1990, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development estimates. A lack of long-term care facilities means seniors increasingly risk living alone in ill-equipped homes or suffering abuse in the care of resentful relatives.
“The system is designed for the 1970s, when multiple generations lived together and family caregiving was thought to continue forever,” said Hiroshi Takahashi, a professor of health sciences at the International University of Health and Welfare in Otawara City. “But that’s not the reality now.”
By 2030, the number of seniors living alone, like Uchida, will increase 54 percent to 7.2 million household units from 2010 levels, according to the National Institute of Population and Social Security Research in Tokyo. Elderly-care costs will more than double to 19.8 trillion yen ($212 billion) a year by 2026, the health ministry estimates. That threatens to overload the world’s second-most indebted nation.
Dying Alone
From now through 2030, an estimated 470,000 seniors will die alone in Japan unless more investment is made in caring for them, Takahashi said.
“Society and the system will blow up around 2025 without a drastic change,” he said.
Japan may be a harbinger of a bigger crisis. Confucian- influenced societies from Vietnam to South Korea are grappling with the conflicting demands of modernization and traditions that venerated the elderly and obligated families to care for them, the Center for Strategic International Studies said in a report in July.
‘Massive Age Waves’
“The family is already under increasing stress from the forces of modernization,” the Washington-based center said. “Over the next few decades, massive age waves are due to engulf the region, slowing economic growth, driving up old-age dependency costs, and heaping large new burdens on governments and families alike.”
China has already sought to protect these values, passing a law last year allowing parents to sue children for failing to visit them. In South Korea, the number of suicides among people ages 65 years and older more than tripled in a decade to 4,406 in 2011, according to the latest available data from Statistics Korea. The increase was probably spurred by an economic slowdown and the erosion of traditional family support, the OECD said.
Worldwide, the proportion of people older than 60 years in populations is increasing more than three times faster than the overall growth rate. Within five years, adults 65 years and older will outnumber children younger than 5 for the first time. By 2050, there will be 2 billion people 60 years or older, from 605 million in 2000, the World Health Organization said.
By 2040, almost 40 percent of the population will be at least 60 years old in Singapore, South Korea, Hong Kong and Taiwan from 14-to-18 percent of the population in 2010, according to United Nations Population Division. The proportion will be 29 percent in China by 2040, from 12 percent in 2010.
Elderly Abuse
The growing demands of the elderly may be stoking violence toward them. In 2011, 21 seniors in Japan were murdered or died from neglect, and the number of elderly people abused by family members jumped 32 percent to 16,599 from 2005 levels, according to health ministry statistics.
After Uchida’s husband died, her 60-year-old nephew stepped in to assist with her application and sponsor her long-term care. The help stopped when his wife intervened, said Uchida, who is 22nd in line for a bed in a nearby home. "
