The No Responsibility Zone

In the Saturday, April 6, 2013 e-edition of the Toronto Star, there’s an article about China that details a new law, effective July 1, allowing aged parents to sue their adult children for not visiting them or attending to their welfare. With China’s elderly population expected to grow to almost 500 million within the next 40 years, there is pressure to curtail the looming health care costs of a soon-to-be bulging population of elderly Chinese. The government’s concern is that many of the economic gains now enjoyed by the Chinese people would be erased under the burden of what would be, by then, the enormous medical costs attached to such a sizable population.  They’re not wrong…

 

What if Americans were legally required to oversee the care of elderly parents?  Insurance companies, now paying out more and more every year for our rapidly expanding elderly population, would likely be paying out less.  Even insurance companies, usually immune to consumer sentiment, would recognize the good public relations inherent in passing a little of their savings back to the customer.  I imagine businesses would spring up overnight to represent the sons and daughters of the elderly.  They’d be like Hollywood agents, telling the parents: “Well, if you want to have direct negotiations with your kids, you’ll have to bequeath them an extra ten percent…in advance!”…

But what if you couldn’t have someone else deal with your parental care situation.  For many cultures around the world, taking care of the elderly was taken for granted-it was something that you just did.  When I was caring for my father, my friends told me what a good son I was, but it just didn’t compute.  Half the time I was either angry, frustrated or anxiety-ridden.  I didn’t have enough money to put my father somewhere good enough to ease my conscience, so all I could really do was to try and pay attention to him.  It turned out that paying attention was at least half the battle…

Isn’t it more than a little embarrassing to have to be ordered to watch over our parents? But the truth is that solving the elderly care problem is like solving drunk driving.  If you really put people proven to be driving while intoxicated in jail for an absolute minimum of 5-10 years and hit them with a million dollar fine, drunk driving would disappear overnight.  Hundreds of businesses would spring up to drive people who were drinking, and the death rates on the highways would be cut in half.  But cleaning up drunk driving using Draconian penalties is almost impossible-too many folks (many in positions of power and prestige) want to be able to drink and drive.  Are legal remedies the only way to insure that people oversee the care of their aging parents?  China thinks so, and in a few months there will be a law obligating adult children to look in on their aged parents.  I once read that Confucius said that only the supremely wise, or the supremely ignorant, never changes.  I can’t even imagine what it would be like if we enacted a similar law in the United States.  In my mind,  I see a parking sign in front of a nursing home that says “THIS IS A NO RESPONSIBILITY ZONE”…

See the article in the Toronto Star at:(http://www.thestar.com/news/world/2013/04/06/chinese_parents_can_sue_adult_kids_for_not_visiting_enough.html)

Take a look at my book about elder care, Feet First-Riding the Elder Care Rollercoaster with My Father (available at barnesandnoble.com and amazon.com) and my blog at http://www.jamielegon.com/