Is old age possible in Russia

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

Last August, the head of Sberbank, German Gref, said the following: “We have such a shameful story - to send our parent to a nursing home. All over the world, the situation is exactly the opposite. It is believed that giving a parent to a home for the elderly is worthy, because these are high-class institutions in which people are provided with the highest level of service, realization of their interests, opportunities for communication, and primary health care."

The word was followed by a deed: Sberbank ordered the development of a concept for a Russian private operator of services for the elderly. It is assumed that by the mid-2030s more than 500 new nursing homes will be built, and the volume of private investment will amount to 500 billion rubles.

Israel, Japan, the United States, and Western Europe have high-end retirement homes that provide high-quality care, entertainment and food at the level of expensive restaurants to the elderly. That's just what it costs at the level of expensive restaurants. Regular insurance does not cover such "high-class" old age. Either a pensioner must be a very wealthy person, or his children will pay quite serious sums. But at the same time, “ordinary” nursing homes in Western countries are heaven and earth in comparison with the current Russian “charitable institutions”.

“All over the world” (that is, in countries outside the “golden billion”) the situation differs little from the domestic one. Nursing homes are social institutions with all the problems inherent in similar institutions in poor countries.

Well-off people in Russia even now have no problems in meeting their old age with dignity: at their service are nurses, paid hospitals, and the very elite European nursing homes that are so fond of being passed off as "ordinary". Is it possible to make a decent old age publicly available? The general direction of human development says that yes, it is possible. And the emphasis here is on the word "mass". Let's remember mobile phones, which in the late 1990s were a sign of status and wealth, but by the middle of the 2000s were in the pocket of every student. A taxi ride was once a whole event, and besides - it seriously hits the budget. Now hundreds of thousands of Muscovites call cars from their smartphones every day and go about their business. Traveling to distant countries was very expensive until massive sites for booking air tickets and hotel reservations appeared.

Examples can be given for a long time. This is the law of economics: as soon as a service becomes widespread, it ceases to be prohibitively expensive. At the same time, life expectancy in Russia will grow. At least, Vladimir Putin has set the goal of joining the 80+ club by the 2030s, which already includes Japan, France and Germany. A surge in the birth rate, on the contrary, is not planned - it would be good to keep at least the current level. Therefore, a significant increase in the number of elderly people who either have no children at all, or only one child, who is unlikely to be able to spend serious sums on parenting, is inevitable. Consequently, the demand for quality nursing homes will indeed become massive, and the cost of staying even in high-quality institutions will decrease, as mobile phones and foreign travel have become cheaper. Just as in the 2000s, “shahid-taxis” disappeared, giving way to high-quality mass-produced cars, and the present squalid nursing homes will become a thing of the past.

But successfully solving the material issue is not all. Overcoming the psychological barrier will be much more difficult. Because there will be more lonely old people, but there will be no less family members.

Let German Gref talk about “the whole world” as much as he wants, where it’s “worthy” to donate elderly relatives to nursing homes, in our country the tradition is different. To send a father or mother to an “almshouse” is practically the same as to hand over a native child to an orphanage. You can only do this in a situation of extreme, impossible, unbearable need. And even in this case, the "refusenik" will be tormented by his conscience for the rest of his life. He will be condemned by everyone who finds out about it.

Perhaps, in this case, you should use the western experience of "wrong words", over which we continue to laugh in the style of "Ebony, and the words are not."

From the phrase "nursing home" breathes something humiliating, unpleasant, shabby, miserable. And before developing the concept of "new nursing homes", these establishments need to come up with new names. Ideally - not only to them, but also to many other phenomena in our life. For example, the word "hospital" is associated with pain in both children and adults. But there is an excellent alternative to this word - "hospital". Perhaps the word "boarding house" will suffice. Perhaps some new term will be coined to characterize the fundamentally changed quality of services. But it is impossible to change the current attitude to the phenomenon without changing the name.

However, it is not a fact that this will help either. There is little doubt that Sberbank has the resources to build at least 500 and 1000 new nursing homes. But will they be able to break the centuries-old Russian tradition of self-care for their elderly?