The activity support service for the disabled is a service that provides activity support to severely disabled people aged 6 to 65 who are unable to live their daily lives alone due to their disabilities. Support for activities such as going out, and visiting bath service, etc. are included in this service and a certain number of vouchers are provided to service recipients every month. In the case of disabled people more than the age of 65, if they are existing recipients and satisfy certain qualifications, they can continue to use the service. However, this standard raises the issue of fairness by making a difference in the payment of welfare services among disabled people over 65. It is necessary to revise the law and expand the standards or prepare supplementary measures.
In general, those above the age of 65 are not eligible for the activity support service for the disabled, and are converted to long-term care recipients under the Long-Term Care Insurance Act. However, this conversion caused the problem of a significant reduction in benefits. So, in November 2020, the amendment to the Act on Activity Assistant Services for Persons with Disabilities passed the National Assembly. Through this, existing recipients of the activity support service for the disabled are able to continue to use the service after the age of 65 if they satisfy certain qualifications. However, equity problems arose among the elderly disabled people. Unlike existing recipients of the activity support service for the disabled, those who did not receive service before the age of 65, or became disabled after the age of 65, are not allowed to receive the service. Though they too are elderly disabled people, there is a significant difference in welfare services that they can receive depending on whether they used the activity support service for the disabled before the age of 65. Criticism has been raised that it is not fair because some are therefore excluded from welfare services. According to the Ministry of Health and Welfare's "2019-2020 Status of Registered People with Disabilities After the Age of 65", 56,236 and 45,910 people were registered as disabled after the age of 65 in 2019 and 2020, respectively. Among them, 10,012 people suffered from severe disabilities in 2019 and 9,273 people in 2020. This shows that there are about 10,000 elderly people with new severe disabilities every year. Setting a particular standard for receiving welfare services in this situation can lead to discrimination. In fact, Kim Ye-ji, a member of the People Power Party said on November 4th, "According to Statistics Korea’s announcement in July, Korea is expected to reach a super-aged society where the elderly population aged 65 or older becomes more than 20% of the total population in 2025. […] It is an institutional contradiction and groundless discrimination caused by the government to apply different standards in a situation where the number of elderly disabled people is increasing rapidly”. It is necessary to revise the law and expand service payment standards or to prepare measures for the elderly disabled people who cannot receive services.
Limited standards for receiving activity support services for the disabled caused equity problems among the elderly disabled people. All of us might need welfare services when we are older, and there is a very real possibility of becoming disabled after the age of 65. Furthermore, these limited standards of welfare services are not desirable at a time when more than 10,000 new severely disabled people every year and Korea is going to enter a super-aged society. The government's active response of revising the law or preparing extra measures are necessary to solve this problem.