My father passed away.
Since last winter, he had been complaining that his legs ached. Every New Year’s Day, we as a family will visit a shrine or temple for New Year prayers, but he said he didn’t want to walk a long distance this year; his physical strength had withered since then, I think.
My parents and I live separately, and a couple of months after New Year’s Day, when I visited them, he complained of being out of shape for some reason, and had great difficulty even going to the bathroom by himself. (Later, a doctor who took care of my father at the hospital explained to us that they assumed that blood had been gradually leaking out of my father’s brain).
This past May, I had a call from my mother, and she told me that my father was in a coma after he hit his head after falling down, while he was going to the lavatory at home early in the morning. In fact, my brother, who was living with them, found my father fallen on the floor and took him to the bed. In the morning, my mother wondered why he wouldn’t get up until late, and she found him to be in a coma, and called an ambulance.
This past October, a general election was held in Japan and the National Democratic Party quadrupled its seats by claiming they would abolish the “one-million-yen tax barrier”. In the current tax scheme, the basic deduction criterion is set at 1.03 million yen, under which we are exempt from paying income taxes. The National Democratic Party has been criticizing, and requiring that the government raise the number up to at least 1.78 million yen in the ongoing, price-increasing situation. Indeed, everybody feels desperate to see a medical bill delivered every June by post.
When I tried doing a math on social security spending according to the rate each year, from 2020 to 2024 the amount of money we have to shell out has increased by 76,000 yen, a decent amount of money to do something extra for a household, actually!!
On SNS, you’ll have little difficulty in finding such comments as, “Don’t pour too much money into the elderly who have no future ahead of them!!” I can partly understand them, but I can’t help wondering how those rabble-rousers who create antagonism between the generations think about their parents or other elderly people around them who are taken care of by the current welfare system or will be looked after in the near future?
Last night, I talked with my mother over the paradox of the relationship between advances in medical care technologies and skyrocketing costs. As new medicines and medical technologies are invented, more and more people are saved and made to live longer; meanwhile, costs spent on invention and research have been swelling, which forces us to spend more on tax and social security, which ends up racking us.
As our aging society advances, the social welfare spending has been snowballing in Japan. In 1990, it was 47.4 trillion yen, which tripled to 137.8 trillion yen in 2024. In particular, medical and nursing care has been expanding the most, taking up 40% of all the social policy spending, to 56.7 trillion yen. The Mitsubishi Research Institute, a Japanese think tank, estimates that the medical and nursing care spending are expected to swell by 60% to 89 trillion yen by 2040.
Is new technology really making us happy?
My father was in bed for about seven months, with his throat incised to put in tubes to drain phlegm and to give him nutrition, as he was incapacitated and couldn’t chew by himself. For the first six months, he reacted to us a lot, which comforted us; we thought he might’ve been able to ride in a wheelchair for the rest of his life. For the last month, however, he was totally bedridden. The doctor didn’t clearly refer to him to be under terminal care, but he was, in fact. My mother and I once talked over terminal care and some people slamming it for contributing to surging social security spending (data refuses this myth, though) before his death through gritted teeth, as we realized that there was an elephant in the room, but neither of us wanted to refer to that. When and who decides to take his tubes out on the basis that he will not get well again?
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