Written by a middle school homeroom teacher, from the Front Page Sections, translated…
Recently in class, I’d mentioned to my students how “Taiwan is an aging community, and we’re going toward the ultra-aging community too, and that there’s a lowered ratio of care-taking, reminding my students, to think about the responsibilities they would have for the future toward their families, as well as the society too.
Several children said, that their parents needed to take care of work, the family, as well as their grandparents, they’d under, great pressure constantly, and weathering the hardships. I’d asked them: when in the future, I and your parents became too old and totally immobile, will you shoulder up the responsibilities to take care of the aging? The kids all fell silent. Then, a student broke the silence, stated: even IF we are willing, but by then, we wouldn’t know if we would be able to make the money to!
Then, I’d introduced to my students, the two opinions on the long-term care that are available right now “the government collect more taxes to support” and “the community place the money into a common insurance program to help pay for it”, and I did a survey of my class. And in the end, the students all showed support toward the “the community places the money into a common insurance program to pay for it”. But a student said, displeased, “wait until we’re older, we may not even be able to afford a place to live in and we’d still needed to pay the taxes to care for the aging population, it’s so unfair; of course, everybody needs to pay, need to shoulder the responsibilities together, that, would be reasonable. After hearing the student, it became even easier for me to understand, why the next generations are so confused and feeling taken.
Looking at the currently elderly populations, although they are entitled to the securities of “pension payments”, but, they’re all, feeling unsettled toward how they’d not prepared enough for their elderly years. And, we’d dug deeper into the reason, and the most common reply was: although we have national health insurance available to us all, but when the elderly needed looking after, the retirement pension will not be enough to suffice, so we’d needed to save more money. This showed how the senior citizens’ needs for a working system in long-term care.
The system of long-term care is not only related to caring for the elderly generation, it’d also places stresses and pressures onto the middle generations, as well as impacting the prospect of the younger generations’ futures; and, are these matters only known, to the younger generations of students, the regular citizens, but out of the minds of those politicians who actually can affect the outcomes?
And so, you see, how the aging population is affecting the world here, right? And, the students’ worries are warranted, because, each and every generation would live longer than the previous generations before, and, with longevity, comes the problems that we couldn’t foresee, the development of dementia, becoming incompetent to make decisions regarding one’s own life, the inability to live on one’s own, the reliance on someone else, to take care of us when we’re elderly, all of these problems had not yet even been touched.