The cozy plans of Minister Helder for Long-Term Care (VVD) have already been responded to on Twitter and in letters sent to the public with a call for the ‘pill of Drion’ or a relaxed euthanasia regulation. Those who are about to get old apparently immediately start to feel that it might be better to kill themselves before they really become needy, because the government has a clear message: you are a burden and you cost too much.
Is elderly care expensive? Yes. And will there not be staff shortages and will they not increase? Probably. But it is strange that a minister has nothing to say to this other than: you have to figure it out yourself, we do not intend to do anything for you. “Most of the people are still waiting for the government to solve it. That will not happen. People will have to do it more together,” said the minister Fidelity. She thinks of more technology (works fantastic for dementia) and nothing else really, the elderly have to solve that themselves.
Do you really need a minister for that?
What is especially unpleasant is that financially driven tone, which stems from something that people at her ministry will probably call ‘realism’. The lack of ideas. Well, except that we all have to exercise and exercise and then we will automatically turn into fit elderly people who will not need any care at all. Because of course it’s always your own fault if things don’t go the way you’d like them to go.
I often think about how things should be when I get old. My very old mother (92) spends a lot of time alone in her flat in Hilversum, even though she receives quite a few visitors. Life has nevertheless become small and boring, but in the end, it is still going and we pray that it continues to ‘go’. Because it must be very hard for someone to qualify for a nursing home, and qualifying is not the same as actually finding a place. The minister thinks that the worst thing about a nursing home is that “you lose your identity [gaat] when you end up in a nursing home, without your own stuff”. Oh dear, by the time someone ends up there her identity is long gone.
Anyway, imagine: there I will soon be sitting in my flat between my ‘own things’, I have developed heart failure and despite all my good movements I can hardly walk, if at all, I have also become quite deaf. I do not have children. What would I like?
The government has a clear message: you are a burden and you are costing too much
Preferably that flat was not somewhere with a view of other flats, but that I lived in a courtyard, a neighborhood, with some greenery and children’s voices. Or, if necessary, in a kind of old people’s home where a film was sometimes played, where we sometimes sung, where we sometimes cooked together or went on an outing so that I could sit and look out the window of the bus, or at a terrace on the water went with a sun and ducks.
That someone would ask: “How are you?” and give me a blanket or a hot water bottle or say goodnight. That someone came in with something tasty or a nice story. Just that I was still a little part of life, instead of having to stretch my leg out to the compression stocking-donning robot that silently seemed to express only this one thing: it would be better if you were gone.
A version of this article also appeared in the newspaper on July 10, 2023.