Preparing for Korea's Super-Aged Future: Planning an Integrated Elder Care System

Abstract

Projected to become a super-aged society in 2025, Korea is expected to experience a rapid increase in the number of individuals in late old age and elderly people living alone—a population marked by acute needs for health care, long-term care, and caregiving services—from 2030 through the 2040s. The current elder care system, centered on the National Health Insurance and the Long-term Care Insurance and supplemented by numerous small-scale government-funded programs such as customized elder care programs, has been assessed as having issues of segmentation, duplication, shortfall, and limited eligibility in service provision. Consequently, there is an urgent need to establish a medium-to-long-term plan to increase provider facilities and service capacity in preparation for the upcoming period of rapidly expanding elder care needs. New and ongoing programs need restructuring, which should involve linking and integrating services in a way that effectively meets the complex care needs of the elderly in a fiscally sustainable manner.