The September Policy Brief by Ricardo Rodrigues and Andrea Schmidt aims to present information on the current picture of public and private expenditure on long-term care for older people and to discuss the challenges of financing care. Moreover it provides preliminary results on potential redistribution effects of home care benefits (based on SHARE data). By that, the Policy Brief tries not only to take a policy-oriented, comparative view on funding arrangements for long-term care but also to serve as a starting point for further discussions on the potential inequalities associated with the different ways of financing and providing long-term care.
This Policy Brief by Ricardo Rodrigues and Andrea Schmidt aims to present information on the current picture of public and private expenditure on long-term care for older people and discuss the challenges of financing care. It also reviews the rationale for public funding of long-term care needs, since the funding is currently relatively low in most European countries when compared to other social protection areas. Also, funding schemes are skewed towards institutional care, even though most older people are cared for at home and age-adjusted nursing home usage rates have been falling. Contrary to health care user payments for long-term care can be quite high as a percentage of an individual's income, especially for institutional care. This can raise questions about which income groups contribute the most to finance care, given that users of long-term care are expected to be disproportionately concentrated in poorer income groups. Using SHARE data, some initial results on the potential redistribution effects of home care benefits are also discussed.
The Policy Brief tries not only to take a policy-oriented, comparative view on funding arrangements for long-term care but also to serve as a starting point for further discussions on the potential inequalities associated with the different ways of financing and providing long-term care.