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There are some alarming social issues arising from the growth in human life span, such as the burden from aged family dependents and growing healthcare budget. Even though governments in the globe are still struggling with such issues, there are still effective and prominent solutions to tackle them, such as expanding job opportunity for the elderly and providing obligatory medical check-up services.
To begin with, many individuals are facing an alarming pressure from their aging family members. As the average life span increases, the elderly need to have means to sustain their lives long after their retirement. Although some aged people are financially prepared enough or still employed, the vast majority of the elderly tend to lose their jobs prematurely to save enough money for their retirement life. Therefore, they have no choice to remain as family dependents of their offsprings, which makes the elderly a huge burden to them. As for society as a whole, increasing human lifespan can be a threat to a limited healthcare budget, since more people live longer than the past, more health risks will be caused by aging popularity. Nevertheless senior citizens become more and more vulnerable to injuries and diseases, they have a tendency to avoid visiting hospital for medical check-ups, because of financial problems or their misjudgment. It has been proven that medical check-ups are avoided more by the elderly compared to the middle aged people. The reasons are simple-a lot of the elderly are out of budget for the regular medical care, and considerable numbers of them often misjudge their symptoms as a mere aging process. This gives rise to a belated diagnosis of serious diseases like cancers and cardiovascular disorders, and this can result in an exponential increase of healthcare budget for society.
Even though aging population can cause such dire problems for both individuals and society, there are still specific methods of resolution that can weaken the threatening phenomenon. For individuals, the pressure to support aging family dependents can be eased by providing senior citizens with the opportunity to remain as working population. To be specific, community centers can plan initiatives like job training courses for the elderly to train them to become competitive employees. Moreover, governments can expand recruitment opportunities for the elderly and introduce policies that extend retirement age in companies. Thereby, more aged citizens will become working population and be financially independent to look after themselves, so that they don’t have to remain as a burden of the younger generations. On the contrary, as for the social problem regarding the rising healthcare budget, providing the elderly with mandatory medical check-ups for free can be a breakthrough to cut down on the final expense. According to a recent study, In the countries with free mandatory medical check-ups, life-threatening diseases for the elderly are found properly and immediately, and the healthcare budgets for those countries are significantly lower than those of the others. Needless to say, when it comes to treating old patients, prevention is always better than a cure. Since the old people have more chances to find out their health problems by medical check-ups, treatments can be done immediately, effectively and affordably. Even if the considerable sum of expenses will be spent for such free medical services, that capital can save a large amount of healthcare budget that previously allocated for serious diseases of senior citizens.
To sum up, in our modern society, many problems are caused by aging populations, threatening both ordinary people and society. The working populations are suffered by the pressure of supporting their old family dependents who don’t have financial capacity, and the society is managed to handle the enormous amount of healthcare budget. This can be resolved by ensuring job opportunities for senior citizens and extending the retirement age, and governments will be able to reduce the healthcare budgets by offering the elderly free mandatory medical check-ups to discover their health problems soon enough to treat. |