Week 10: Post your Blog Entries as Comments to my Main Post Each Week

Post by Sunday at midnight.


1. Mark Whitaker

2. statistics on elderly pensions and elderly poverty in Korea

3. Since we're discussing the unique features of the "East Asian" welfare state this week and next..., here's something to think about: elderly suicide and its sociological contexts as caused by the Korean welfare state choices. The 'national pension' is nothing of the sort--it's for full time workers (similar to a corporatist model, instead of citizens), and this means it is hardly a universal system. It leaves many elderly in Korea poor and contemplating suicide. Certainly "Confucian ethics" (as Kim argued) are little applied in the Korean welfare state given the complete disregard for the elderly in the Korean system. Korea has the highest elderly suicide rate in the world by many times over, and its partially an issue of the welfare state organization.

-----------------


[Editorial] Older generation’s suicide epidemic

A very troubling incident occurred on Sunday during the Parents’ Day holiday. In the city of Yongin in Gyeonggi Province, a chronically ill husband and wife in their sixties hanged themselves, unable to bear being a burden to their children. They sent their son and his wife, who had been caring for them, off on a trip with their children, and they proceeded to take their own lives. It is heart wrenching to imagine the pain that couple must have felt, and the grief of the children who read the note they left saying, “Sorry and thank you.”

As South Korea rapidly proceeds toward a graying society, suicide among the elderly has gone well into the danger zone. According to figures released recently by the Hallym University Institute for Aging Studies, some 77 out of every 100 thousand South Koreans above the age of 65 or old took his or her life in 2009. The number has risen sharply, with an increase of more than fivefold in the twenty years since 1990, when it stood at 14.3. In 2007, Japan, which at one point earned the nickname “suicide kingdom,” had an elderly suicide rate of just 23.8 per 100 thousand people.

In spite of this, the issue has not received much attention in society [by the welfare state]. Instead, it has been written off as an issue of the individual’s psychological health, a family issue, or something along similar lines. The situation is that the very people who overcame suffering and achieved development over the turbulence of the Korean War, industrialization, and democratization are now ending their own solitary lives, abandoned to a blind spot in society.

On New Year’s Eve last year, a couple in their sixties took their lives after leaving a note that read, “We are leaving this world because we are not able to live anymore.” They had been scraping by on the money left over after paying 300 thousand won rent ($277) out of the 430 thousand won basic livelihood allowance they received each month.

Their suicide cannot be separate from a reality where, amid a failure by the social and health care systems to accept responsibility for diseases afflicting them, the majority of senior citizens do not have any income preservation system such as the National Pension. Last year, the poverty rate among South Korean senior citizens was among the world’s highest at 48.5 percent !!! ALMOST HALF ELDERLY IN POVERTY, in a 'developed' country, is a political and developmental CHOICE, instead of an accident], far in excess of the OECD average of 13.3 percent.

[And even if you get a pension, it a liberal style welfare state pushing you back into the market:] The basic old age pension received in 2010 by 3.73 million of the nation’s 5.5 million elderly amounted to just 90 thousand won a month for a single household.

The central and local governments need to step up their sense of alarm about senior citizen suicides and begin work on investigating the situation and developing prevention measures.

In addition, the public support system needs to be strengthened, for example by including among the recipients the more than one million people who are ineligible according to the National Basic Livelihood Security Act due to factors such as having children earning a certain income level. [So the elderly parents impoverish the family and the elderly feel guilty and kill themselves--due to the structure of the welfare state being based on family welfare means-tested criteria instead of individual welfare rights. The Korean system set up on private family based support mostly, and a small, unacceptable basis for those without it: a liberal welfare state idea, there]

Judging from the government’s plan for national finances, however, the percentage of the welfare budget out of gross domestic product is set to continue its decline from 7.5 percent in 2009 to 6.9 percent this year and 6.6 percent in 2014. As long as this continues, we will be unable to erase the shame of having the highest suicide rate among our senior citizens. [and the rate will only go higher by plan--by callous disregard.]

---
http://english.hani.co.kr/arti/english_edition/e_editorial/477164.html