Wednesday 9 May 2012

Funding care - or how to lose friends quickly...

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From the Centre for Social Justice (so not to be sniffed at given its links to Iain Duncan Smith):

...we are consumed by a debate about how to protect the housing wealth of people who might need care in the future. Such a narrow focus about care funding ducks the crucial question: how do we build a competent and compassionate social care system fit for all, including the poorest?

Indeed, the entire aim appears to be avoiding having to tell nice middle-class folk like me that they'll have to sell mum's house when she goes into a home. Which of course means we won't inherit that money.

If we were not protected by the knowledge that taxpayers we've never met will cough up to provide us with care in our dotage then we would make provision ourselves. And be prepared to sell the house.

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1 comment:

Anonymous said...

It's going to come hard for any politicians to break it to folk that they're been lving under a misapprehension.

Once the Welfare State arrived, it became the standard view that personal wealth accumulated through life and not spent would be passed on to the next generation because, after earning days were over, the State would provide.

The State managed to provide for a while, until the scope of that demand started to escalate, as a result of many social changes - increased lifespan, distant families, unshared property expectations etc.

Some brave politicos have to find a way to get the message across that personal wealth is there for your person, not for the persons you bred, so use it to provide your own care.

The real problem comes when those who did save for their later years see those who didn't receiving State care - looks like an incentive not to save which, over time will be the effect, so the State gets shafted again.

The only answer is to make State provision so unutterably bad, e.g. workhouse-level, that most folk will then see it as a choice and will start to save to avoid that. But which party has the cojones to float that boat ?