Jim's Quality of Life OnLine

Choice is very important, particularly in old age, and, at age 90, I am seeing the worries which are afflicting so many senior citizens - some of which can be minimised by their own right choices and some of which urgently require the right legislation to remove these worries.

First Worry:

Will I be able to afford to pay my health insurance premiums or will I be left without health cover just at the time I need it most?

I'm lucky enough to have a War Service Gold Card which enables me to have the best medical and hospital service free. What a blessing. It's not just the treatment, because I have been lucky enough to have very little, but what is important is that I have not had to worry about it at all. Why should not a Gold Card be available to everyone say over the age of 80 years? At the election before last, a similar suggestion was quickly crushed as far too expensive for us to afford. I ask: "How come it is too expensive when it is for us - all of us? We are the people who are going to need it and worry about it and suffer. It is a benefit for everyone because we are all going to get old." Some say it would be abused but isn't that just a matter of simply using our brains to organise the system correctly so that it is impossible to abuse? . But this benefit for us all will only happen when people realise the huge benefit available to them personally, and start to work for it.

Worry Number Two:

Will I run out of money before I die?

By a stroke of the pen, the last Australian Government crushed a great benefit (the Annuity Assets Test Exemption) which was easing this problem. I was a Certified Financial Planner before I retired at age 87, and I put a great deal of my clients' retirement funds into lifetime annuities with CPI indexing. This meant the husband and wife received indexed income payments monthly until both of them were dead . This annuity was not counted as an asset under the Assets Test which meant they received the full pension. For many quite modest retiree clients, very often it meant they would receive over $900 per week total income. This helped the local economy because, instead of the retirees being on miserable pensions, they were reasonable spending citizens. I found that, amongst other things, this encouraged couples to put their money into producing an ongoing income rather than spending it on overseas trips, etc. Originally that was one of the reasons the lifetime annuity exemption law was put in place.

The new Australian Government should immediately restore the Assets Test Lifetime Annuities Exemption. In the overall financial picture, I believe the cancelling of this benefit probably costs more than it saves - and particularly it costs retirees a lot of unnecessary worry.

Worry Number Three:

When I was a polio patient in an iron lung, the medical prognosis for me was that I had a fighting chance of getting out of the iron lung. Alongside me were two friends Les and Bill. On them the prognosis was that they would die in the iron lung. When you are in the iron lung your feet and hands are enclosed in the box. If a fly lands on your nose, you can't knock it off, or scratch your ear. You are alive, but there is very little chance for enjoyment of life. I saw these two suffer this for years and then each one died. Despite the ifs and buts about euthanasia, I felt there should be a clear legal position where a person can say to their doctor "I have had enough". The worry so many people have about what might happen at their death can be removed immediately by correct and carefully constructed legislation giving a choice..

Worry Number Four:

Living in a three-bedroom villa in a magnificent retirement village, Classic Residences (Brighton) - where there are about 400 residents - one finds that those who have a partner with them are regarded as the lucky ones. The thing they fear most is losing their partner. Isn't this the message we should be sending out to all our marrying and divorcing young ones? I am one of the lucky ones - we have been married for 61 years - and to young ones reading this I'm saying "go for it! Do everything possible to make your long relationship work because later on this will add greatly to your quality of life."

So here are the worries, the choices - and the solutions. Are we going to make sure they are available so that hundreds of thousands of older people can stop worrying and improve their quality of life?

Best Wishes,

JIM VICKERS-WILLIS
Author of "The standard Australian Square Dance" (Rigby, 1953), "Are You (Really) Fun To Live With?" (A best seller, 1974), and "The Magic of Life" (Sid Harta publishers), just published.

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