Thoughts On The Construction Of Old-age Service System With Chinese Characteristics

Accompanied with the depth of the aging, the demand of social endowment serviceincreases, while the existing pension ways in our country are facing challenges to some extent,failing to meet this demand. The huge pension service supply gap causes the attention of thegovernment and the society. Establishing a perfect social care service system across ourcountry as soon as possible is particularly necessary and urgent.The construction of social old-age service system must be based on China’s specialnational conditions. The serious situation of aging, the entrenched urban-rural segmentation,the strong concept of “feedback” family pension and the existence of large scale emptynesters all should be taken into account in the progress of building social old-age servicesystem with Chinese characteristics.In order to perfect the social old-age service system, we need to clear the problems of thethree pension models: owing to the shaking of the family pension basis and the lack ofrelevant social support, the function of family endowment is weakening; the facilities ofhome-based community care are not perfect, and the huge potential of which is to be explored;the function of family endowment is greatly limited by some problem, such as lacking ofencouraged policies, the inherent development of the industry industry itself and so on.Considering the special social background of China and the current situation of theconstruction of old-age service system, this paper puts forward our country should build up amulti-level and comprehensive social endowment service system with Chinese characteristics,which consists of family endowment as the basis, community-based home care as the mainforce and the pension institutional care playing a supporting role. In the progress of the policyformulation and actual implementation, two principles should be obeyed: on the one hand, weneed to respect China’s traditional culture, making full use of the kinship and geographicalrelations in pension services; on the other hand, the level of economic and social developmentalso should be taking into account, establishing these concepts: covering each old people,diversification, integration and progressive development. Specifically, it should start fromperfecting the three types of endowment models: firstly, we need to develop and optimizefamily pension resources; on the one hand, regulate the behavior of family members bystrengthening the system and moral constraints of family pension; on the other hand, improvethe enthusiasm of family pension from both rigid and flexibility aspects, through the mechanism of induction of interests and preferential policies, to consolidate the basic role ofthe family endowment. Second, improve the home-based community service mechanism, andthe most urgent things are to expend its funding sources and to improve the construction ofrelated facilities as soon as possible, such as senior citizen centers, health center, catering inthe community and domestic calling device, barrier-free facilities, etc.. Except those,cultivating a strong and specialized voluntary pension service team is also very important.Finally, encourage the growth of the pension institutions, leading the institutional pensionindustry develop in the direction of standardization and diversification.