Having long passed 64, Geoffrey Vine longs for a health system that still needs him and feeds him.
Will you still need me, will you still feed me, when I'm sixty-four? Prescient words written by a 16-year-old Paul McCartney but you have to wonder what was going through his head when he wrote them. I was only 25 when I interviewed him 50 years ago and it never occurred to me to ask why.
Reflecting on this now, the obvious answer would be that in England, as in New Zealand, the age of retirement was 65 and, as I recall my father saying, at 64 you looked at what was soon to happen with a mix of gleeful anticipation and dread of the unknown. It really was traumatic to be 64.
All that has changed, of course. There is no longer a retirement age, just an uncharted but equally traumatic period classified as ''old age''.
Not only that, but none of the aged concerns that McCartney conjured up at 16 seem remotely realistic now, except perhaps the well known refrain, ''Will you still need me, will you still feed me ...''
Those 10 words in many ways reflect the dilemma of the elderly in the South, myself included.
The Southern District Health Board does not need us and most certainly doesn't want us; after all, its funding formula is weighted against our growing numbers.
The question of whether they will still feed us is, if you will excuse the pun, a sick joke.
The last time I was in Dunedin Public Hospital, a nurse presented me with a phone and suggested I ring a family member to ask them to bring me fish and chips or a pizza as the ward had insufficient meals to feed every patient.
What this points to is the massive elephant in the room we call New Zealand: the welfare of the aged.
The needing and feeding, as well as the other concerns that a teenage McCartney lightly touched on, were relevant at that time and policies formulated to tackle them.
The trouble is, they are still seen as the elderly's issues to be tackled in the same way today.
Think of it this way: 100 years ago, bureaucracy's big headache was the insufficient number of public horse troughs; imagine our reaction if horse troughs were still the focus of today's bureaucrats when asked to tackle transportation issues.
We have an elderly health and welfare system designed to tackle the problems facing the much smaller elderly population of 50 or more years ago and our bureaucrats and many politicians blindly cling to that thinking in the face of today's vastly different reality.
The elderly exist in larger numbers than before and these numbers will continue to grow. Applying yesterday's solutions to tomorrow's problem simply will not work.
We have to come at the problem from a different direction and, no, I am not jumping on the euthanasia bandwagon.
I am not a healthcare professional but I am a healthcare consumer.
When I was younger, I had a vague idea that when you got old, things could go wrong health-wise.
What neither Paul McCartney nor anyone else ever told me was that these things don't go wrong one at a time; rather, you are likely to find multiple problems occurring simultaneously.
My sad awakening came about five years ago when my GP asked me to list my ailments in order of priority as only one or two could be addressed at each visit.
Coupled with this was the realisation the health system could cope reasonably well with ''sudden'' things, such as a concussion after a fall, but not with slowly worsening things, such as my multiplying cataracts that were making driving a nightmare.
Fixing the latter would have done wonders for my wellbeing but my ophthalmologist said there was no point referring me for surgery as public waiting lists were so long, I would need to be legally blind before I could even be considered for treatment.
When, as things got worse, I opted to spend some of my retirement savings on private treatment, the wait was only two weeks and the surgery took just seven minutes.
The difference to my quality of life was awesome.
This is one small example of how we tackle the problem from the wrong direction.
The public health system focuses on treating the absolute worst cases where, to be brutal, the benefit of the surgeon's skill may be measured in weeks rather than years.
Hip replacement surgery for someone whose longest walk is going to be from their bed to the en suite toilet achieves little.
That same surgery for someone with longer life expectancy would result in a more productive life that made fewer demands on the health system.
Simplistic? Maybe. But it is all a matter of rethinking our approach to these problems.
I presume Winston Peters was trying for a new approach with his recent attempt at legislation mandating regular health ''warrant of fitness'' checks for the elderly, which failed to pass by just one vote (a case of conservative politicians clinging to yesterday's approach).
Early identification and treatment of health problems before they reach crisis level sounds like common sense. At 64, it makes sense; when I'm 94, it will be too late.
Let me sign off with some more of the lyrics to that McCartney song: Yours sincerely, Wasting away.
Geoffrey Vine is an elderly, retired Dunedin journalist and Presbyterian minister.
