Incentives for health and late retirement

The health ministry is considering advocating or rather exploring the opportunity to provide incentives to Singaporeans so as to encourage them to stay healthy.
The “what’s in for me if I should stay healthy” mentality that many has is really a ridiculous one to begin with and I wonder why the need to give incentive to people to stay healthy? Seems to me that this truly defies logic. Health is a personal responsibility as much as we consider the Government responsibility to ensure Singapore remains a healthy and safe place to live in. Just go to the hawker center and you will find people of all different races, shapes, sizes and ages gulping and eating food like nobody business.
No doubt some of the health incentive programs which has been put in place such as free health screenings, free helpline and counseling programs for those who wish to quit smoking and many other support activities has benefit much, however it will be successfully with personal mindset change. Some people would have no problem queuing up for hours or perhaps even days to buy ‘Hello Kitty’ toys or lottery tickets but would quickly shun short queue ups for free health screenings. No incentives in the form of free health screenings and this or that would convince these people.

On the other hand most of us are all aware though that our health deteriorates with age and that one can never fight against Mother Nature. We can slow down the ageing process; there is neither miracle technology nor medicine though that could effectively treat or prevent diseases due to aging process. It all written in the wall, the moment we breathe our first into this world, we begin the journey towards sunset. By the way, there is the health campaign promotion to encourage the citizens to stay healthy so as to be able to retire much later in life, say instead from the retirement age of 55 or even 60 to 65. I certainly applaud the move by the health and other relevant ministries with regards to this, not only a healthy mind and body enable the elderly to retire much later in life thus enabling them to earn their keep and to live in dignity instead of having to put up in the old folks home. We should also be mindful that some diseases such as diabetes or cancer may be hereditary in nature and thus there’s only so much we could do to prevent or delay the onset triggering of it. Some people still contract lung cancer even though they are not smokers nor have they come in contact with smokers.

Speaking of late retirement, I am reminded of a research article written by a doctorate student ‘Sing Lin’ for the ‘Member of National Council of Chinese Institute of Engineers – USA/Greater New York Chapter, and Member of Board of Director of National Taiwan University Alumni Association – Greater New York March 2002’ entitled ‘Optimum Strategies for Creativity and Longevity’. In his research paper, Sing Lin wrote that his researched studies indicate that those who retired at the age of 55 or below tend to outlive those who retire at 65 or beyond. It is pretty much up to you to believe or ignore his research findings. We only live this once, thus one thing for sure; my personal opinion though is that I don’t think it is such a good idea to work till 65 cause by then we would not be able to enjoy the fruit of our labor so what’s the point? We should work to live and not live to work so to speak isn’t it?