The 'Elder Bulge' is Here--and What Will it Mean for Big Healthcare?
What does ageing mean for (post)industrial societies? Here's what Norwegian authorities are considering
A slow day (happy national holiday, Switzerland, by the way), but I also found something quite interesting in legacy media. As always, I’ve endeavoured to translate and place some emphases in the piece.
Norway to Scrutinise Healthcare Services for the Elderly: ‘Will uncover a number of failures’
Over the next few years, the authorities will carry out a major audit of health and care services throughout the country.
By Morten W. Røkeberg and Stian Haraldsen, NRK, 1 Aug. 2024 [source]
The heralded and much publicised wave of elderly people is approaching. The challenges are many, and authorities hope to get ahead of them by conducting a large-scale investigation of the services provided to elderly people living at home.
‘We assume that we will uncover a number of failures, but we are keen to ensure that they are rectified, and that we can learn and improve, and create better services, so that people have confidence in the services provided to the elderly’, says Sverre Lerum, senior adviser at the Norwegian Board of Health Supervision, to NRK [employing classic corporatese feel-good boilerplate utterances without substance].
Over the next three years, the Norwegian Board of Health Supervision and the State Trustee will carry out a number of inspections of health and care services for the elderly throughout the country.
How Norway will be changed
These are the hard facts about how Norway will change in the coming years:
In 2040, Statistics Norway (SSB) estimates that there will be just over 6 million people living in Norway, almost half a million more than today.
Over the next decade, the population will consist of more elderly people over the age of 65 than children and young people between the ages of 0 and 19. This will happen for the first time in 2031, according to Statistics Norway’s forecasts.
By 2050, about one in five Norwegians is expected to be 70 years or older.
‘We expect the population over the age of 80 to double by 2050, and to total almost one million by 2100’, demographer Ane Tømmerås told NTB before the summer [that would be in excess of one (!) out of every six (!) residents].
This is one of the reasons why the health authorities are now investigating the situation [what might the others be? Alas, the piece doesn’t say…].
‘We know that more and more elderly people are living at home, so we need to be sure that they get the help and care they need. So the fact that the inspectorate is prioritising people living at home is great, and means that our services will be even better’, says Ellen Rønning-Arnesen, State Secretary at the Ministry of Health and Care Services, to NRK.
Many Concerns
Sverre Lerum of the Norwegian Board of Health Supervision says that they already know something about the challenges that exist:
We have failures related to nutrition, handling of medicines, and fall prevention, and what we see is that the overall care of the elderly can be difficult and challenging. We have carried out a lot of inspections of nursing homes, and we want to know more about what happens at their home [uh-oh, the gov’t wishes ‘to know more’ about your home: what might go wrong?.
[NRK] Are these services good enough today?
[Lerum] We're worried about just that, which is why we want to monitor this [again: how? What about privacy? Is there a chance to ‘opt-out’ of gov’t monitoring of private homes?].
Prepared for Shortages
One country that is seriously worried about what will happen when the ageing wave really hits is Japan. An ever-increasing proportion of the population is elderly, and the growth rate is not large enough to cope. That’s why they have major projects underway involving robots, among other things [first, that’s extra-sad, and, second, this will do more harm than good as humans appear to be social animals, i.e., no human (or animal) touch, people will die sooner—but perhaps that’s the plan?].
The government has great expectations of the inspection project, which will take place throughout the country.
‘I hope learning and improvement will come out of it, so that those who work in care services can do a better job. At the end of the day, it’s all about the individual living at home, that they can trust that they will receive good and safe services [provided by gov’t, after they’ve ‘monitored’ your activities]. This is extremely important as the number of elderly people in the country is increasing’, says State Secretary Ellen Rønning-Arnesen.
[NRK] They expect to find some mistakes, what do you think about that?
[Rönning-Arnesen] That’s the way it should be; you uncover things when you carry out inspections that enable us to make good, systematic improvements. It’s important for the people who work in care services, but also for us, the relatives, in terms of errors being discovered.
Bottom Lines
More gov’t meddling in private lives because they are ‘worried’, hence their alleged need to ‘monitor’ everything. What could will go wrong?
As regards the corporatese boilerplate utterances, well, we shall take stock and see what they’ll deliver, eh?
With respect to robots and machines supplanting humans in care professions, well, we kind of know what will happen, don’t we?
Frederick II of Hohenstaufen (26.12.1194 to 13.12.1250, Roman Emperor, German King, King of Jerusalem and Sicily, nature observer, behavioural scientist and writer) is credited with one such attempt (Eberhard Horst, 1975): ‘The Emperor wanted to find out the original language of mankind. He therefore had some newborn children taken away from their mothers and given to nurses and wet nurses. They were to give the children milk so that they could suckle at their breasts, bathe and wash them, but under no circumstances should they cuddle or speak to them. He wanted to find out whether they spoke the Hebrew language (after they had grown up), the oldest language, or Greek or Latin or Arabic, or the language of their parents who had produced them. But he laboured in vain, because all the children died…For they cannot live without the patting and the happy grimacing and the caresses of their nurses and nourishers.
Here’s the (German-language source, an Encyclopaedia of Psychology).
I surmise that it’ll take a bit longer with adults/elderly (relative to children), but the outcome will be the same.
What I find most troubling, though, are the two elephants in the room: labour shortages (it’s very hard to find GPs willing to work in rural Norway already, as is the case elsewhere in the West) and the dislocations that will ripple through the economy and everyday life as staff shortages in one industry will spill over into other, seemingly unrelated industries (mainly because gov’t or the private sector will prioritise one over the other industry, e.g., care workers over fishermen).
Over two years ago, the early warning signs were clearly visible as certain professions—healthcare workers, specifically—attracted less and less students.
Back then, I outlined the most likely outcome:
What then, will be most likely done to us by the powers that be?
Running into a set of actually quite comparable troubles, the Roman Empire in the 3rd Century AD first decreed maximum prices for what we may arguably call ‘goods and services’ before moving on to rendering professions hereditary.
We’re already experiencing variations of these measures, as exemplified by collective bargaining procedures as well as certain limitations on job choice, such as residency contracts and the like. Apart from these ‘extra-economic’ constraints, economically and socially, essentially comparable pressures and limitations—academic potential is highly correlated with parental achievement—are currently serving as ‘(in)visible’ guardrails.
I suspect that more and more of these measures will be implemented over the next couple of years, putting more pressure, from ever more angles, on the possibilities and freedoms of any given individual.
And, lo and behold, we’re already there: earlier this week, the deputy chairman of the Socialist Left (Sp) argued for residential obligations for members of the armed forces (they should reside where their units are stationed).
I suppose that these kinds of coercive measures will increase in the coming years.
Change my mind?
Stian Haraldsen
They may try to coerce the young into caring for the elderly for terrible pay (e.g. via some sort of national service). However, I've said it before, and I'll say it again: no country can survive as a gigantic nursing home. Something's got to give, and my guess is that one way or another, we'll just live shorter lives (on average). This is bad, but it's not all bad. My grandmother, for instance, would have been massively better off if modern medicine hadn't "saved her life" and extended her life by those two utterly miserable years. This sort of "gift" is pretty standard now, and it may just become a thing of the past, as care gets rationed.
I for one don't see any problem. There will - temporarily - be a surplus of elderly citizens. Any "problem" with tis has its own built-in solution, which humans cannot effect: people die. A new equilibrium will be reached on its own in a few decades anyway, so nothing needs doing at all except temporary measures re: health care/nursing homes.
Labour market, property values, et cetera will adjust on their own if the state and the capitalists just let them, and instead of trying to dictate what will happen instead adapt to what is ahppening and what the new normal will eventually stabilise as.
Hubristic shortsightedness and the silly belief that you can achieve some kind of permanent state of being for a nation.
"In 2040, Statistics Norway (SSB) estimates that there will be just over 6 million people living in Norway, almost half a million more than today."
Yeah, that's not happening. Norway will be pried open for invasion-migration no matter what the norwegians want. Look at Finland - 15-20 years ago, they were more restrictive than Hungary is today. Then, the lobbying from globalists and the EU took off, and now after heavy feminisation of politics for the last two decades they are rapidly approaching Sweden's state of societal suicide.