Last Saturday I keynoted the Philippine Expo on Aging Well held at the Metrowalk, Pasig City. It was organized by AgeWell Philippines, a club of pharmaceutical giant Unilab that is dedicated to helping seniors and “soon-to-be” seniors stay healthy, happy and active.
During my keynote, I spoke about the need to change the conventional view that aging automatically comes with more disease, increased dependency and diminished productivity.
Such a pessimistic view is, in fact, counterproductive. Various researches have shown that this kind of negative outlook is self-fulfilling. As one Wall Street Journal article suggests, if we think about getting older in terms of decline or disability, our health will likely suffer. If we adopt, on the other hand, a more positive view of aging—when we see it in terms of opportunity and growth—then our bodies will respond in kind.
Demographers and economists speak about the “graying” or the “aging” of a population as if a massive crisis is looming, where ballooning social pensions will be too burdensome for governments and public health-care systems will be overwhelmed with age-related sicknesses. Aging is viewed with doom and gloom.
I have tried to change that mindset in 1992, when I successfully got Congress to enact the country’s pioneering Senior Citizens Act (RA 7342). The Act explicitly recognizes the elderly’s contribution to the Filipino family. It acknowledges the family practice of keeping the grandparents in the same household, rather than shipping them out to an old people’s home.
Through the law, we granted seniors a 20-percent discount on various goods and services, as well as mandated government health facilities to provide them free medical and dental services. We even exempted seniors from certain levies and taxes.
Our Constitution even requires that families should take charge of the care of their elderly members. Article XV, Section 4 of our Constitution states that caring for the elderly is the duty of the family. The Senior Citizens Act helps ease the financial burden associated with the discharge of this duty.
Easing the financial burden consequently opens up the opportunity for senior citizens to continue being productive members of society. That’s why RA 7432 also encourages senior citizens to render services to their communities, as tutors, consultants, teachers or lecturers. And to oversee such volunteer work, the Office of Senior Citizens Affairs has been established in each town and province.
These changes have helped nurture and foster in people a more positive, constructive and caring mind-set toward the senior citizens.
More certainly still needs to be done to put this mental outlook into active practice. Senior citizens still are among the poorest sectors of Philippine society. According to the latest data from the Department of Social Welfare and Development, there were roughly a million senior citizens in poor households across the country in 2011.
In 2015 the Commission on Population (PopCom) said that while Filipinos are generally living longer, they are not necessarily healthier, given that their quality of life has not improved. PopCom Executive Director Juan Antonio Perez III even said that our social-protection systems have yet to catch up with social conditions and that the elderly are only partially reaping the benefit of better health care.
A 2015 University of the Philippines Population Institute study projected that the country’s senior population (60 years and above) would balloon from 6.8 percent in 2010 (around 6.2 million) to 10 percent in 2025 (roughly 12 million). That means the country’s senior citizen population will double in less than 10 years.
Our society’s leaders do rightly to focus on nurturing our young. But we also need to start preparing for an aging population, for we can’t move forward and plan better if we get stuck to the obsolete view that aging is a burden.
E-mail: angara.ed@gmail.com.