To promote employment and re-employment of older people, the elderly employment provisions in Article 12 of the Aged Employment Promotion Act, written as non-binding recommendations, should be made mandatory, and the law should be improved by adding penalty clauses so that they can actually be enforced. It is also necessary to merge the senior skills bank and senior workshop programs under the Ministry of Health and Welfare's rules with the elderly employment information center and senior talent bank provided for in the Aged Employment Promotion Act.

A distinct approach is also needed for older people in need who must work to make a living, and for middle-class and wealthier older people who work mainly for meaningful social participation, for whom economic reasons are secondary.

Article 27 of the Elderly Welfare Act provides that health checkups and health education may be offered to people aged 65 or older, but within a limited budget the checkups are currently restricted to older people on livelihood assistance who want one and to those whom the head of the city, county or district finds in need of one, so poor publicity and weak follow-up keep the program from detecting and preventing disease. It should therefore be turned into a mandatory provision so that all older people can benefit from health checkups and health education.

To ease high medical costs for older people, their co-payment rate should also be lowered. Rules on special benefits that let insurance cover age-related diseases should be added to the medical insurance law, or, alongside the checkups in Article 27 of the Elderly Welfare Act, special senior medical benefits including nursing care should be provided for.

We have reviewed the definition of the Elderly Welfare Act and its problems. The act is aimed narrowly at low-income older people, and because it was written as encouragement rather than legal obligation, the state's administrative responsibility is small. This is clearly undesirable, and revising the Elderly Welfare Act can be seen as essential.

While researching this paper, I learned that elderly welfare is not working as well as I had thought. I also learned that revising and creating welfare measures for older people is urgent, and that they need not only economic support but also cultural and educational support. Above all, I think greater public attention is needed for this.

To add, the paper leaves out several important changes. The Long-Term Care Insurance Act for the Elderly took effect in July 2008 and covers, as social insurance, care for older people who struggle with daily life because of age-related illnesses such as dementia or stroke, and since July 2014 the Basic Pension Act has paid a basic pension to older people in the bottom 70% by income. The Aged Employment Promotion Act was renamed in 2008 as the Act on Prohibition of Age Discrimination in Employment and Aged Employment Promotion, and the mandatory retirement age of at least 60 applied to workplaces with 300 or more employees from 2016 and to all workplaces from 2017. Korea became a super-aged society in December 2024, when people aged 65 or older passed 20% of the population.