Reply #87: Something I forgot to mention about Japan [View All]

[Lydia Leftcoast]

My oldest friends in Japan are a couple a few years older than me. Until about seven years ago, the husband was a medical school professor at a major university, but when he reached compulsory retirement age for his school, he decided to take a part-time position at a new health sciences university in a rural area that trains nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists, dieticians, everything in the health field except M.D.'s and dentists.

The university has a rehabilitation hospital attached to it, and the patients are all disabled in some way, from things like strokes, accidents, or degenerative illness. They live in rooms that they can decorate themselves, and relations between patients and staff seem to be respectful and even affectionate, certainly none of the off-handed callousness that I've seen in nursing homes here. Nor did I see drugged up and restrained people in wheelchairs lining the hallways, another common sight in U.S. nursing homes.

Anyway, it's a very nice facility, and as I was being shown around, I asked who paid for all this. The answer shouldn't have surprised me: the government counts the kinds of disabilities that the patients have as chronic or catastrophic conditions and pays the full tab.