U.K.: Do Not Deny The Elderly An Equal Right To Life, Says Researcher On Ageing Societies

LONDON (Financial Times), January 16, 2008: I wish my contemporaries would stop dying. They deprive their friends and families of their company. They oblige us to go to ted-ious and inaudible funerals where the Anglican church tries to claim them as its own and no one pays much attention to what they achieved in life. Their descendants get involved in legal labyrinths and cannot make head or tail of their possessions or what they have left on their hard discs. (The dead leave clear instructions only for what should be destroyed, not for what should be kept.) As T.S. Eliot put it in The Waste Land: "I had not thought death had undone so many." The chances of dying still rise with age, but the percentage of men of 75-84 who die has fallen from 11.6 per cent 30 years ago to 6.5 per cent today, the percentage of women from 7.5 per cent to 4.6 per cent. Life expectancy at 65 has risen to 81.6 years old for men and 84.6 for women - a kind of average age of death. It is all the more upsetting when people fail to reach the average - like falling to a sniper's bullet the day before the armistice. So what excuse do people have for dying early, when surveys show that people usually live longer than they - or their pension providers - expect them to? Life expectancy is correlated with income and all that goes with it, but it can no longer be maintained that people "die of old age". As they live longer, they become more vulnerable to diseases that can, with sufficient resources, be either prevented or cured. The National Health Service gives higher priority to keeping middle-aged people healthy than to preventing old people from dying. This attitude was summed up by the poet Arthur Hugh Clough years ago: "Thou shalt not kill/ But needst not strive/ Officiously to keep alive." Discrimination against older people is like asking the umpire in cricket to apply the rules more stringently to the batsman as he approaches his century. Yet there is plenty of evidence that older people get a poor deal in the National Health Service, notably in the March 2006 report "Living Well into Later Life" by the Healthcare Commission, the Audit Commission and the Commission for Social Inspection. The picture is confirmed by the recent Healthcare Commission report on dignity in care - and the lack of it in many NHS hospitals. Spending on health is projected by the Treasury to rise from 7.9 per cent of gross domestic product in 2005-2006 to 9.9 per cent in 2055-2056, almost certainly not enough to cover the ageing population and less than in comparable countries. Worse than the neglect of geriatric services in the NHS is the failure of the government of England and Wales to provide free, non-means-tested long-term care, as opposed to NHS services of dubious value, to the elderly. Scotland has provided this service for many years, but English and Welsh local authorities are obliged either to cut services, or to raise council tax - which the elderly can ill afford to pay. There should be no discrimination in the provision of life-supporting public services to the elderly, as proposed by Sir Derek Wanless in his final April 2004 report, Securing Good Health for the Whole Population. The nearer death approaches, the more valuable the remaining years of life appear. Happiness - now a goal of public policy - can be defined simply as not being dead. But many who have struggled with the chaotic care system may feel that they would be better off dead. The government has reacted with a new system to give money directly to carers and the elderly to spend as they wish, which should make it easier to provide care at home. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development last year published a book entitled Live Longer, Work Longer , drawing attention to the need for later retirement to finance pension provision. There is a good case for a book called Work Longer, Live Longer. This would point out that the stimulus of continued paid work, voluntary work caring for other family members, learning another language or pursuing a hobby would encourage greater longevity. By adding life to your years, you add years to your life. The elderly are becoming financially more dependent on the young. They should not therefore feel that they must make way for them, cease to be a burden and pass on their inheritance. On the contrary, they can make a big contribution to the economy and to their own salvation - in this world, not in the next. The premature disappearance of the elderly cannot be a solution to the dependency problem. Christopher Johnson, the author is former chief economic adviser to Lloyds Bank. He is working on a research project on ageing societies. He is 76. Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008