여성 노인 1인 가구의 실태 및 정책적 개선방안

Abstract

Korean society has witnessed rapid increase in population of elderly forming one-person household(hereinafter referred to as “single-household elderly”) amid an increase in single-person household and aging. In 2014, the number of single-household elderly comprised 23% of entire elderly population. Among them, the number of single-household female elderly stands at 1.04 million which accounts for 3/4 of whole single-household elderly population. Single-household female elderly represent the class with whole elements of socially-disadvantaged, including elements of women, elderly, and solitary life, and encounter the greatest difficulty in connection with nursing care for illness, economic insecurity, and psychological anxiety/loneliness. Such issues are considered to fall under health realm, financial realm, and social realm. The objective of this study was to examine specific conditions and problems which were manifested in each realm and to explore measures for mitigating such problems at policy level. In the health realm, there are problems of benefit recipients who have little or inadequate communication ability primarily due to mental constraints such as dementia(Alzheimer’s disease). Government’s supportive policy mostly relates to medical and livelihood support, such as dementia examination project, dementia treatment & management support project, livelihood support project including long-term recuperation insurance system designed to help stabilize lives of elderly with dementia, etc. However, such supportive policy of government needs to be pushed forward in tandem with legal support in order to maximize desired effect, considering that even excellent medical and livelihood support services may become useless if the ability to use and manage such services is inadequate. For that, legal and social inter-connective system needs to be buttressed to ensure that adult guardianship system can be fully leveraged. In other words, it is deemed necessary to identify and connect to eligible single-household female elderly with dementia, establish procedural structure, and provide public guardian service, and furthermore, the support needs to be provided to underpin education for development of public guardians, establishment of infrastructures, budget preparation and fund-raising process, etc. In addition, even elderly long-term recuperation insurance system, which has positive effect in stabilizing the lives of elderly with dementia, needs to map out multi-faceted supportive system differentiated in terms of quality of care service and long-term recuperation allowance based on gender, type of household, and type of disease, thus ensuring adjustment tailored to situations of single-household female elderly. Meanwhile, single-household female elderly experience financial instability twice as much as their male counterparts in economic realm. In fact, poverty rate of female elderly stands at 41.2% which is 10%p higher than that of male elderly who are reported to have poverty rate of 31.2%. Female elderly has higher reliance on private transfer income with their labor income level remaining below half that of male elderly, which results in low economic independence and high financial instability of female elderly, in stark contrast to male elderly who earn the largest portion of their income from labor income. Such problem needs to be addressed by public transfer income. National pension plan system, the most typical public pension system, has unavoidably limited scope of pension benefit disbursements to single-household female elderly because such benefit disbursements are based on past job and earning history of pension holders. In short, the system has double vulnerability which means small number of recipients and low level of allowance such as recuperation allowance. Therefore, it is considered necessary to increase the ratio of present and future single-household female elderly covered by national pension plan in order to ensure that pensionable right can be secured independently. Based on that, the access of women to labor market should be made easy, and the wage level should be aligned with reality in light of characteristic of labor provided by women. Furthermore, an improvement is needed for basic pension system that functions as Old-Age Income Security System for single-household female elderly as witnessed by the supply-demand status of basic pension for female elderly whose population is 1.8 times larger than that of their male counterparts. In other words, legislative purpose of National Basic Livelihood Security Act and Basic Pension Act can be attenuated if basic pension is included in individual countable income when the livelihood benefit under National Basic Livelihood Security Act is estimated. Actions need to be taken swiftly with respect to such inclusion or exclusion and related scope. Above all, the priority is to map out ‘Housing First’ policy that provides good housing first to low-income single-household female elderly. That is deemed to be the policy that underpins social welfare most effectively in helping address low-income poverty. Moreover, such policy can produce the greatest impact when it is accompanied by policies designed to bolster job creation for the elderly, particularly single-household female elderly. Finally, it relates to issues of psychological anxiety or loneliness in social realm. Single-household elderly commonly express psychological anxiety or loneliness, whether they are men or women, and related influential factors differ significantly. In other words, employment status and financial conditions are most influential factors for men of advanced age while disconnection from social relationship is the most influential factor for women of advanced age. Single-household female elderly tend to experience alienation and disconnection from society because they are living alone without any co-habitating family member. Consequently, single-household female elderly are very likely to encounter psychological or emotional anxiety or loneliness, and such social isolation may lead to very serious social problems such as lonely death, suicide, etc. Thus, a new social relational network model, called ‘social family’, is presented to overcome such problems. Despite supportive policies of government, spontaneous attempts and efforts of private sector may redouble the effects. For instance, Senior Hope Community has proceeded with a movement called Social Fam(Social Family) consisting of more than 4 persons from 3 generations such as grandparent generation, parent generation, and sibling generation. In addition, various types of community life households, i.e., co-housing, needs to be pushed forward. Co-housing represents a measure that can help form and maintain stable social relationship and networking among single-household female elderly, along with their safety, and therefore, there is an increasing need for cooperation between government and private sector, spearheaded by central government, local governments, NGOs(Non-Governmental Organizations), cooperatives, etc. Aforesaid measures, which are designed to achieve improvement for each realm at policy level, have inter-relational systematic effect. For example, adult guardianship system helps provide single-household female elderly with access to social welfare services such as long-term recuperation insurance/basic pension, etc., as well as medical treatment, when they have dementia, thus contributing to guaranteeing public old-age income security. Thus, analysis of systematic interrelationship and related effect, etc., needs to take precedence in establishing and enforcing policies associated with conditions of each realm.