The Right to an Age-Friendly City by Meghan Joy

Author:Meghan Joy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: McGill-Queen's University Press
Published: 2020-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

AGING AS A CRISIS

While several participants admit that population aging is a positive demographic occurrence because it indicates improvements in societal health, more people living longer is overwhelmingly seen as negative because it will result in more reliance on government to provide care. My findings illustrate that population aging is considered a problem because it increases societal difference as it brings new experiences, particularly needs. The metaphor of a “tidal wave” or “tsunami” of need about to drown us all is prevalent in the rhetoric used by several participants. This drowning metaphor relates to our capacity as a society to meet the needs of a more “hard-to-serve” population, with several participants questioning who will provide this care and who will pay for it. A city employee explains that aging is “a challenge because of the ‘inverted pyramid,’ which means that we will have less tax dollars to offer services” (B6). Redistribution is considered infeasible in this context of increasing need, as young people will be unable to support the old and this will create a fiscal crisis for the state. This reflects an increasingly prevalent argument that our social welfare systems cannot survive the onslaught of diversity (Antonnen et al. 2012a).

A major concern among participants is the so-called “burden” senior citizens present to the public health care system, which risks being “bankrupted” by their needs. The “horrible expression that you hear about the ‘bed blockers’” (D8) refers to seniors who end up staying in hospital beds for long periods of time because inadequate care is available for them at home and there is no space available in an appropriate long-term care home, transitional housing, or palliative care facility. According to this rhetoric, the senior is understood as a burdensome body, taking up space and resources. Often ignored in this discourse is the decades-long project of hospital restructuring and cuts to beds in the acute sector in Ontario that has caused this drastic shortage of supports, as was outlined in the previous chapters.

Equally underexamined is the problem that there is an inadequate system of public long-term care homes and home care to support seniors both before and after their hospital stays. Challenging investment in the former is a discourse that associates living in a long-term care home with “bad aging” because the individual is understood as dependent, passive, and segregated from society or community. I detected a normalized critique of welfare state policy, which participants align with a statist past that characterized all seniors as sick and poor and with a paternalistic approach that segregated seniors in institutional environments because they were considered no longer able to participate in everyday life on their own. While this approach was based on an image of senior citizens as worthy and deserving of a collective public response, it was also based on stereotyping and resulted in paternalistic programs that failed to recognize diverse needs. Alternatively, aging at home is associated with “good aging” because there seniors are considered independent, active, and included in society and community.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.