Nursing Home Facilities

By Kwon Yule-jung

The two-day annual conference on veteran affairs was held at the War Memorial Hall last month. In attendance were prominent scholars and senior staff from the United States, France, Australia, Canada and Taiwan.

I was also invited to the international meeting, serving as a moderator on welfare policy for veterans and their dependents. More specifically, I addressed nursing home facilities and their operation plans in an era of aging.

With the accelerating aging society in Korea, many policymakers are afraid of a pension deficit amid a decline in the number of young people and dwindling productivity.

Therefore, many elderly parents are at their wits’ end as to how to live comfortably after retiring from or losing their jobs usually in their 50s or even early 40s through early retirement programs.

Unlike Westerners, who focus more on themselves rather than giving priority to their adult children, Koreans usually ``bet their lot’’ on their young ones in order to see them enter prestigious universities and go on to find prospering careers. Excessive competition to enter excellent universities leads to Koreans’ exorbitant spending on private tutoring for their children.

Such trends are very unique in Korea. Nevertheless, there aren’t any Nobel recipients in the academic fields of medicine, chemistry, physics, biology and economics _ only in peace, which a former president was awarded in 2000.

Their sole pursuit during their adolescent period is directed to merely passing the university admissions test. After that, their academic enthusiasm tends to die down. As a consequence, many students lose their interest in advanced study and lack creativity.

I mentioned the requirement of nursing home facilities for elderly veterans and their spouses. Even though only a few remain who aren’t supported by their children, they have no other choice but to resort to state subsidies.

The Ministry of Patriots and Veterans Affairs has begun to set up five nursing homes across the country. In the first stage of the project, welfare infrastructures were under construction in Suwon and Gwangju.

To our dismay, a facility for elderly veterans in Busan was blocked by neighbors who feared that it would lead toward a decline in the value of their houses because of the negative reputation it would bring.

Frankly, I cannot make public such unreasonable actions to foreign experts. We Koreans may be more prone to such not-in-my-backyard (NIMBY) mentality than people in developed countries.

Kwon Yule-jung is director of the management division at the National Cemetery in Daejeon.