Creative Solutions

How  are we ever going to fund health care given our aging populations?  The "funding of health care" is supposed to be one of the straws that will finally break the camel-back of the economy. After forty years as a family doctor,the most effective health care I have seen was not the most expensive and high tech, even though it is wonderful to have such things to fall back on.

In 1991 Tsutoma Hotta had an idea for addressing such costs as a retirement project. He created the private Sawayaka Institute of Wellbeing. It issued "personal care vouchers" good for an hour of service, and 100 non-profit organizations signed on to accept such vouchers ("Fureai Kippu") for their services. Different services had different hourly values, so for example, helping an elder with his bath was valued as representing a higher time value doing his shopping or cooking. It is expanding and getting support from the government.

At about the same time, in New York City, Elderplan a not-for--profit insurance company with the motto "a broken towel rack to-day is a broken hip tomorrow", began to offer minor repair services payed for in "Time Dollars". This proved so successful, it came  to accept them for a quarter of its work. (Time Banking, was created in the US by Edgar Cahn, and it too is expanding)

In both of these experiments, the elderly clients reported their preference for services offered this way, saying the care givers were more attentive. In Japan, generous tax supported social services are already available, so the volunteer care givers were complementary to the system. Japanese who  help old or sick people  "bank" the time they give to be used in case they later get sick and need  help themselves, or right away for the care of elderly relatives who  live at a distance.

 We  hear a good deal about school  bullying, and the response of many communities  to "get tough with offenders". A recent NY Times article reported on an alternative approach. A parent  (mother or father) and baby spend some time in the classroom in a program called "Roots of Empathy": children exposed to the parent and baby became less mean to each other.

Maybe we can achieve certain socially favorable ends with fewer official rules, taxes, & bureaucracy than we might  ever have imagined possible.