"Few people can see genius in someone who has offended them." - Robertson Davies

***

JB nursing homes - MOH clarifies
(bizarrely, there isn't a permalink to this on the MOH's main page - which means it can't be linked to and it will fall off in a few months)

"Minister Khaw was only sharing an observation about the different cost structures in JB and Singapore, and in fact this option is something that those who want to stretch their budget are already doing... In fact, some readers shared the view that the availability of lower nursing homes in JB gives many Singaporeans more options."

I was pleasantly surprised to read this. It seems that, contrary to official policy, online opinion expressed in fora beyond REACH is being responded to. Simply put, it's part of good Public Relations - there's no point in letting matters blow up if they don't have to (even if the response is slower than it should be, but then a journalist friend shares that PR people are always overworked).

Meanwhile, the content of the release is also interesting.

The uproar about the Powers That Be forcing us to ship our parents to JB always struck me as ridiculous. Offering Singaporeans more affordable retirement options was portrayed by many commentators as heartlessness and endorsing the shipping of our elderly off to foreign gulags.

Presumably the idea was that there was a sort of substitution effect where, instead of maintaining their parents in Singapore, Singaporeans would kick them to JB or Bintan. This effect would become even stronger with government endorsement (actual or perceived).

Yet, just because the elderly are domiciled in Singapore does not mean that they live good lives. They may be holed up in one-room flats and/or have to work to help maintain themselves. A walk around Singapore during lunchtime reveals many suffering what seems to be the fate of many elderly in Singapore - collecting soft drink cans at food centres and picking up corrugated cardboard for sale. Many surely find living in a retirement home in JB or Bintan preferable to that.

Many elderly also finance their own retirement (e.g. those with no surviving children, or those who prefer not to rely on them), and would definitely appreciate more options; the same logic is seen in people who retire to New Zealand, Malaysia or the countryside.

Of course, a better option would be the implementation of some sort of retirement scheme which involves risk-pooling and some measure of cross-subsidisation, but that will happen as soon as the government changes, so we shall limit ourselves to the art of the possible.

Most people do not understand that giving people more options is not the same as "coercing" them or "exploiting" them. Indeed, even if you used a broad definition of exploitation, as Allen Wood points out in his excellent essay on Exploitation (which will be excerpted here some day), "by interfering with exploitative arrangements... [we] risk consigning the vulnerable person to an even worse fate than being exploited".

You see a similar fuss kicked up about the legalisation of paid organ donation. Yet, assuming there is no coercion involved, why people should get so upset is a mystery.

An alternative argument is to conjure up vague notions about the "dignity of life" which, not coincidentally, has also been used in arguments against general stem cell research and in-vitro fertilisation (test tube babies).

In the end, what people who oppose paid organ donation are essentially saying to putative paid organ donors is: "I want to have more say about what you can do with your body than you".

Similarly, what people who oppose there being retirement homes in JB or Bintan are saying is: "I want you to retire in Singapore, whether you like it or not".