Fewer than one person in five who requires nursing home care will benefit from government reforms due to be announced today, an analysis found.
The National Pensioners Convention described the reforms as “about as credible as a Findus lasagne”.
Dot Gibson, the convention’s general-secretary, said: “Setting a lifetime cap on care costs of £75,000 will help just 10 per cent of those needing care.”
The aim is to provide a form of social insurance. Not to nationalise the care of the elderly.
And social insurance does rather require that there are more people paying in than are benefitting. You know, that’s the point of insurance, the pooling of risks? And just because such insurance is being provided in a “social” manner through the tax system doesn’t change that basic point about insurance.
7 responses so far ↓
1 Steve // Feb 11, 2013 at 10:22 am
I’m sick of all the adult babies in this country demanding to be coddled by government. Geriatrics should be particularly wary lest they end up on one of the State’s “care pathways”.
2 The Meissen Bison // Feb 11, 2013 at 10:37 am
The insurance analogy isn’t entirely apposite though since the individual can do quite a bit to qualify for a pay-out. We’ve created a society where you’d be crazy not to die a pauper.
3 john b // Feb 11, 2013 at 1:24 pm
TMB: but that’s the ideal outcome.
The vast majority of older people have children who they love. The vast majority of younger people are screwed by the gerontocratic concentration of wealth that homeownerism has created.
So if we create an incentive for older people to pass on their wealth to their kids now rather than have it used up in care costs, then that makes everything significantly fairer and leads to the far more sensible use of assets (ie families get to live in family-sized homes, rather than them all being occupied by the LVT Widow Spectre).
A few old people – guessing 10-20% – either don’t have kids or have kids they don’t like. Their incentive is to squander everything and party it up like 1999, which probably doesn’t do any harm either.
4 john77 // Feb 11, 2013 at 8:13 pm
I fail to see why someone who no longer needs their home because he/she is in residential care (with or without nursing) for the rest of his/her life and his/her partner is likewise or dead should not sell their home and use *some* of the proceeds to pay for it.
Allegedly the average house price is just under quarter of a £million, average residential care costs £26k. How many people live in a residential care home for five years, let alone 10?
5 MellorSJ // Feb 11, 2013 at 9:44 pm
Four sensible perspectives above.
Not one of which would ever be heard on the BBC.
6 David Bouvier // Feb 12, 2013 at 4:24 pm
Also, while only DIRECTLY helping 10-20% of people, hopefully this move will enable the development of worthwhile care-home-cost investment/insurance policies.
The extreme long-tail of costs has been one of the things that has prevented this market taking off.
7 john77 // Feb 12, 2013 at 7:57 pm
@ David Bouvier
That is an (possibly *the*) excusable/morally defensible reason for this move. I don’t agree with the decision but I have to accept that some people think that this justifies it.
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