Guardian UK: 30somethings can't admit they will face an impoverished retirement without proper care

[marmar]

A generation in denial
Thirtysomethings can't admit they will face an impoverished retirement without proper care

John Harris The Guardian, Saturday July 19, 2008



Eileen Puc is 75 years old. What has happened to her is both shocking and depressingly commonplace; hers is one of those stories that have long made it into the pages of regional and local newspapers, but only occasionally been picked up by the people who fill up national publications and TV bulletins.

With the unease that comes from imagining yourself in someone else's predicament, I heard about Mrs Puc on a recent BBC Wales evening news programme. In 2005, having suffered two strokes and become unable to speak, she was moved into the same Cardiff nursing home as her 86-year-old husband, where she could receive 24-hour care. Despite her condition, the often impenetrable process that decides these things claimed her needs were not of sufficient "complexity, intensity or unpredictability" to make her eligible for NHS funding. Thus far, she and her family have paid out around £60,000 in care fees, but a complaint registered by a relative led to the Welsh public service ombudsman calling for a full review of her case, and the possibility of her bills being belatedly met by the health service.

Slowly but surely, more and more of these stories are being pushed into the foreground, in keeping with rising disquiet about the tangle of maladministration and mistreatment that often awaits people after retirement. But the fears they reflect seem to be denied decisive political weight by one of the great modern paradoxes: that as the number of older people increases, so too does a massed refusal to engage with what that entails. A culture in which middle age has been blithely rebranded "middle youth", it seems, has precious little room for a conversation about what it might mean to be old.

My own generation looks like the key source of the problem. Millions of us can look forward to life beyond 85. One in eight of us will live to be 100; to quote from Julia Neuberger's recent book-cum-manifesto Not Dead Yet, "thousands could make it to 110, or even older". As she also points out, our experience of old age is likely to be complicated by sociological changes that we have yet to take in; for example, given that may of us aren't having children until our mid-to-late thirties - if at all - we may well find the expectation of help from our family dashed by the fact that we will be looking to people in the prime of their professional lives. Though a lot of us will disprove the assumption that old age means long spells of illness and frailty, we will require serious money to fund our eventual retirement; as and when we eventually surrender to dependency on care, our financial needs will be all the more urgent. .......(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/jul/19/longtermcare.socialcare

[morningglory]

1. Hell!! 60-somethings! nt

[Skittles]

2. 60, 50, 40, 30, 20..........

the way things are now, ALL of us get f***ed