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Austerity, Up Close and Personal, Part 2 “Austeritywitz”: German Elderly Being “Shipped to the East”

COMMENT: An aspect of Ger­many’s “aus­ter­i­ty” dik­tat that has escaped notice and dis­cus­sion con­cerns what Deutsch­land is doing with its poor, elder­ly peo­ple. Because of the expens­es involved in car­ing for the these “unde­sir­ables,” they are being shipped “to the East.”  We have seen this from Ger­many before.

The unini­ti­at­ed might be inclined to dis­miss this as being of lit­tle sig­nif­i­cance. After all, they aren’t being killed, are they?

Not yet, they aren’t. On the oth­er hand, IF they were, who would report it? And with “aus­ter­i­ty” the order of the day for the Ger­man-dom­i­nat­ed EU, what will hap­pen as the “expense” of deal­ing with the infirm increas­es?

Sev­er­al things to keep in mind when mulling this over:

“Ger­many Accused of ‘Deport­ing’ its Elder­ly: Ris­ing Num­bers Moved to Asia and East­ern Europe because of Sky-High Care Costs”; Mail Online [UK]; 12/27/2012. [9]

EXCERPT: Ger­man pen­sion­ers are being sent to care homes in East­ern Europe and Asia in what has been described as an ‘inhu­mane depor­ta­tion’.

Ris­ing num­bers of the elder­ly and sick are moved over­seas for long-term care because of sky-high costs at home.

Some pri­vate health­care providers are even build­ing homes over­seas, while state insur­ers are also inves­ti­gat­ing whether they can care for their clients abroad.
Experts describe a time bomb’ of increas­ing num­bers unable to afford the grow­ing costs of retire­ment homes.

And they say the sit­u­a­tion should be a warn­ing to Britain, where ris­ing num­bers of pen­sion­ers are forced to sell their homes to pay for care.

The Sozialver­band Deutsch­land (VdK), a socio-polit­i­cal advi­so­ry group, said the fact that many Ger­mans were unable to afford the costs of a retire­ment home in their own coun­try was a huge ‘alarm sig­nal’.
‘We sim­ply can­not let those peo­ple, who built Ger­many up to be what it is, be deport­ed,’ VdK’s pres­i­dent Ulrike Masch­er told The Guardian. ‘It is inhu­mane.’

Accord­ing to Germany’s fed­er­al bureau of sta­tis­tics, more than 400,000 senior cit­i­zens can­not afford a Ger­man retire­ment home, a fig­ure grow­ing by around 5 per cent a year. This is because many are liv­ing for longer while their pen­sions are stag­nat­ing.

As a result, the Krankenkassen – or statu­to­ry insur­ers that make up Germany’s state insur­ance sys­tem – are dis­cussing cheap­er care in for­eign retire­ment homes.
EU law pre­vents state insur­ers from sign­ing con­tracts with over­seas homes.

But that is like­ly to change as leg­is­la­tors are forced to respond to Europe’s age­ing pop­u­la­tion. . . .