English: Wintern Day Centre Large house providing day care of the elderly and a venue for other forms social care,on the southern edge of the town. Run by Pembrokeshire County Council. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

English: Headquarters of Southern Health & Social Care Trust The headquarters of the Southern Health & Social Care Trust – formerly Craigavon & Banbridge Health and Social Services Trust – on the Craigavon Area Hospital site. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I thank Dr Alf for reblogging the Guardian article entitled Elderly care revolution as state-backed insurance scheme announced. Here are my own views.

It will never work!

The average cost of a stay in a local authority care home is £100,000 gbp a year plus and typically old people in that environment last 3 years and then die.

A £72,000 gbp cap will therefore not help even assuming local authorities had the money, which they don’t because 50% of county council, unitary authority, metropolitan borough, London borough and City council budgets are already consumed by Adult Social Care costs.

This is without factoring in the 1.25 million woman who already have early stage dementia and the additional numbers of people with diabetes who could well go blind whilst in care.

Insurance for long term care is very expensive and nett disposable income for an average family of 4 was £97 gbp in 2012 and is lower now.

The wealthy will be excluded anyway so where is the money to come from?

More radical solutions are needed now:

• Transfer those Adult Social Care recipients without relatives to India and Thailand where care costs are much lower
• Aggressively re-enable as many first time Adult Social Care recipients as possible
• Use robots in care homes for lifting, feeding, toileting, bed turning and showering patients
• Impose variable taxes on foods
• Use the ESD toolkit /CRM to identify those at risk of becoming Adult Social Care recipients and then divert them onto a path of diet, exercise and sustained weight loss before they become a financial burden to the taxpayer
• Merge the Adult Social Care and NHS budgets, rationalize and make savings on duplication, inefficiency and people

John Gelmini

Related articles

• A Hard Look at How to Reform the UK’s NHS Effectively – John Gelmini (dralfoldman.com)
• Elderly care shakeup: how will it work? (guardian.co.uk)
• Why Dozens of Local Authorities are Collapsing in the UK – John Gelmini (dralfoldman.com)
• A Hard Look at UK Austerity and Correcting the Mistaken Lessons of History – John Gelmini (dralfoldman.com)
• NHS A & E departments ‘left unsafe by political meddling’ – Remedial Action – John Gelmini (dralfoldman.com)
• Effective Reform of the NHS – John Gelmini (dralfoldman.com)
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