Some people do not like to sign such a statement. Other times, sons or daughters will not allow their parents to make such a declaration, because doing so would not reflect well on them. In these cases, the poor, older person has to rely on the non-means-tested Old Age Allowance (OAA), a sum of $1,000 HK provided by the government to all seniors at age 70.
CSSA carries with it a social stigma. Many who do not want to apply for CSSA will try to live on the meager thousand dollars provided by OAA, which means an unimaginably hard life in a city like Hong Kong, where the cost of living is not cheap.
While surveys and research reports in the Western world show that most older adults have finished high school, studies here report that the mean number of years of education received by Hong Kong seniors is only two to three. Many of them do hard manual labor their entire lives. Hong Kong is an affluent society but, as in many advanced countries, most of the city’s wealth is possessed by a very small percentage of the population. Our older folks, in particular, are not well off.
For Reflections on Nursing Leadership (RNL), published by the Honor Society of Nursing, Sigma Theta Tau International.
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