Korea’s Dementia Crisis

January 12, 2014 Leave a comment

January 8, 2014, 5:21 PM

Korea’s Dementia Crisis

JAEYEON WOO

South Korea’s population is aging rapidly.

The tragic deaths this week of the father and grandparents of Lee Teuk, leader of K-pop boy band Super Junior, are raising calls for South Korea’s government to do more to lighten the burden for dementia patient’s families.The superstar’s father and grandparents were found dead at their home in southern Seoul. According to media reports, police said a note at the scene suggests Mr. Lee’s 59-year-old father, who for several years had been sole caregiver for his parents—both suffering from dementia—committed suicide after killing them. The case is still under investigation.

The financial, physical and psychological stress of dealing with dementia is hitting more and more people in South Korea, where looking after these patients is widely regarded as a “family matter.”

Taking care of one’s parents is a Confucian value many South Koreans still strongly adhere to. Seeking outside help is deemed undutiful—not that such help is easily available. As the number of senile-dementia patients in this rapidly aging country climbs, the social-welfare system lags far behind.

The number of dementia patients age 65 or over who visited a doctor for treatment in 2011 hit 288,987—more than three times the number five years earlier, which works out to an average annual growth rate of 24%. And the number of dementia sufferers not getting professional help is believed to be much higher.

Government policy responses have included increasing health-insurance benefits to cover lighter dementia, operating a hotline, and training more professional caregivers. There are plans to build more public hospitals for dementia patients; there are currently only seven nationwide.

But a leader of the opposition Democratic Party called on the government to act more aggressively.

“Welfare policy is based on the notion that the government guarantees everyone a minimum level of life,” Kim Han-gill said Wednesday.

Filed under Health, Macro Trends

Unknown's avatarAbout bambooinnovator
Kee Koon Boon (“KB”) is the co-founder and director of HERO Investment Management which provides specialized fund management and investment advisory services to the ARCHEA Asia HERO Innovators Fund (www.heroinnovator.com), the only Asian SMID-cap tech-focused fund in the industry. KB is an internationally featured investor rooted in the principles of value investing for over a decade as a fund manager and analyst in the Asian capital markets who started his career at a boutique hedge fund in Singapore where he was with the firm since 2002 and was also part of the core investment committee in significantly outperforming the index in the 10-year-plus-old flagship Asian fund. He was also the portfolio manager for Asia-Pacific equities at Korea’s largest mutual fund company. Prior to setting up the H.E.R.O. Innovators Fund, KB was the Chief Investment Officer & CEO of a Singapore Registered Fund Management Company (RFMC) where he is responsible for listed Asian equity investments. KB had taught accounting at the Singapore Management University (SMU) as a faculty member and also pioneered the 15-week course on Accounting Fraud in Asia as an official module at SMU. KB remains grateful and honored to be invited by Singapore’s financial regulator Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) to present to their top management team about implementing a world’s first fact-based forward-looking fraud detection framework to bring about benefits for the capital markets in Singapore and for the public and investment community. KB also served the community in sharing his insights in writing articles about value investing and corporate governance in the media that include Business Times, Straits Times, Jakarta Post, Manual of Ideas, Investopedia, TedXWallStreet. He had also presented in top investment, banking and finance conferences in America, Italy, Sydney, Cape Town, HK, China. He has trained CEOs, entrepreneurs, CFOs, management executives in business strategy & business model innovation in Singapore, HK and China.

Leave a comment