The Elderly Care in China
China has the largest number of elderly people in the world, which is also a developing country with the fastest aging population. The aging population has put tremendous pressure on China’s economy, politics, and society, especially the financial system, medical service system. The central reason for the aging society is the decline in the birth rate due to long-run one-child policy, lower death rate, and longer life span with the increasing economic conditions. Among them, population aging has a huge impact on the caring system of the elderly, and this caring system is an important line of defense for the elderly.
According to the article “ Does China have an aging problem?”, the author raises an essential disadvantage of the aging population, which is the decreasing productivity in China. In other words, the great percentage of the elderly and low birth rate over years means that the working-age population is reduced, so there is a much heavier burden on the working-age population to raise the young and care for the elderly. Also, since the elderly population increases, there are more elders needed to take care of, and the longer life span will extend the time for the elderly to receive pensions, which puts heavy payment pressure on the government.
I agree that the aging society receives a heavy financial burden because of the elders, but it is not the most urgent problem. Rather, most elders are not able to afford medical care even with government funds. The frequency of illnesses and hospitalization costs for the elderly are significantly higher than the average. After retirement, the life expectancy of the population has increased, and the demand for medical insurance has risen. This is important because it illustrates that the medical care for the elders does not have sufficient resources, and the health-care insurance systems vary from region to region (Wang & Chen, 2014). Especially in the rural region, the younger generation usually stays in the urban areas for work, so the elders need to take care of themselves. Therefore, an article from Zhihu, the Chinese Quora, addresses that the elders usually won’t get on-time medical treatment when they are sick, and there are not medical services such as hospitals or nursing homes for them. As a result, these are all urgent problems needed to be solved in order to provide better living conditions for the elders. Given the controversy surrounding the issue, there are many debates raised around how to care for the elders.
In “Why China can support the elderly so well”, the author discusses a solution for insufficient medical care resources which is the private-run senior care center. Because “In Beijing, to secure a bed at any public nursing home usually needed to be on the waiting list for around 20 years.”, people’s demand can not be satisfied, so the private-run senior care center could be a much better substitution where elders can move in within one month and have living conditions superior to public nursing homes. According to the article, those care centers combined medical services and elderly care together, so every member can have access to medical care when needed. For some centers which have more resources, they usually construct hospitals themselves while other centers will choose to build close to community hospitals.
However, sufficient resources with 24-hour care services mean those care centers have a really high fee which many families and elders can not afford. To add to this debate, surveys in “Dilemmas in caring for older adults in Zhejiang Province, China: a qualitative study” by Ma, Jianwei, and Li reveals that only people who have the high financial capacity and are more open-minded show their willingness to both nursing homes and care centers because they don’t want to be a burden to their family. Even though there are elders who want to go to nursing homes but limited by their financial capacity, most elders especially those from rural areas illustrate their hatred of nursing homes, and they consider that going to nursing homes is shameful. This is because they believe that their offspring are the ones who are responsible for their elder life, and only the elders who don’t have children or have a close relationship with their children will be sent to nursing homes. Even worse, some might consider that their families abandon them in the nursing home, and most of them relate nursing homes with loneliness.
With regards to Chinese society, the government developed a new elderly care system, which is the community-based care center. Community-based care centers provide elders with basic medical services and other services including meal services and cleaning services, and it aims to keep the elders in their homes with care from family members while relevant service centers and people in the community provide home-based services or care services for the elderly(Zhang & Yang, 2019). In other words, for elders who don’t want to leave their homes but their families can’t be full-time carers, they are able to order services such as haircut, and there will be people who go to the elders’ homes to do the haircut for them, providing great conveniences for incapacitated elders. Also, elders could choose to go to specific services centers according to their specific needs. For example, my grandmother usually goes to the care center in her community to do a basic health examination every month to make sure everything goes well. Some of these services such as health examination are for free while most services such as providing meals, doing haircuts, and cleaning rooms do have a price to maintain the care center but at a reasonably lower level with regards to elders who have the low financial capacity. In Wenzhou, my hometown, there are more than two thousands community-based care centers as of the end of 2020, and the Wenzhou government has imposed policies this month to develop a hundred community-based care centers as models by several aspects including improving infrastructure construction more suitable for elders and providing more services (Huang, 2021). However, Ma, Jianwei and Li demonstrated that most elders don’t know the existence of those community-based care centers and the services they provide, so many elders could not take advantage of community-based care centers.
As a result, I came up with new thoughts about how to take care of the elders based on my previous plan of spreading the nursing homes and lowering its prices. I did not reject my plan entirely, but it can’t be achieved because if the prices are too low for poor people to afford, nursing homes would not have enough money to maintain themselves. Also, “Dilemmas in caring for older adults in Zhejiang Province, China: a qualitative study” reveal many problems with nursing homes that not everyone can accept going to nursing homes. Therefore, based on the sources I have found, I came up with one possible solution according to the problem of medical care I have indicated before. To be more specific, advertisement of community-based care centers is essential for elders to know that they are able to receive help from these centers and the prices are very minimal. Also, by promoting the project, the government could receive more funds to invest in centers. Hence, the government could develop these centers with more services, not limited to simple nursing services since the elders would have other demands due to their rising life expectancy. Overall, the elder population had delicate lives to build a better society for us, and it is our responsibility to provide them a comfortable life during their later years.
Citation
Does China have an aging problem? ChinaPower Project. (2020, March 19). https://chinapower.csis.org/aging-problem/.
Huang, W. (2021, March 17). 温州今年将改造100家社区养老服务中心. Zhejiang News. https://zjnews.zjol.com.cn/zjnews/zjxw/202103/t20210317_22256265.shtml.
Ma, S., Shi, J., & Li, L. (2019, March 15). Dilemmas in caring for older adults in Zhejiang Province, China: a qualitative study. BMC Public Health. https://bmcpublichealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12889-019-6637-0.
Wang, X., & Chen, P. (2014, March 6). Population ageing challenges health care in China. The Lancet Journal.
Why China can support the elderly so well. (n.d.). https://news.cgtn.com/news/2019-09-12/Why-China-can-support-the-elderly-so-well-JVygx2Hkcw/index.html.
Zhang, L., & Yang, J. (2019, January 24). The different models of Community Eldercare service in China. https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fsoc.2019.00007/full.
安老网. (2019, September 20). 触目惊心！农村养老问题到底有多严重？. 知乎专栏. https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/83341789.
