Ministers are considering a so-called “retirement levy” which would see taxpayers pay a lump sum to the Government in order to meet the spiralling costs of residential and social care in old age.
The proposals would see retirees make a one-off payment into a ‘national care fund’ which would go towards meeting the costs of funding their stay in residential homes, it is understood.
Why not just let people pay a lump sum to an insurance company? Even, finance it over a working life with monthly payments?
Why, we could invent a word for it maybe. Assurance possibly? A pension even?
“One-off payment”
Soon to become a regular “one-off payment”.
Never trust the Government when it says things like this.
Weird that taking it from the estate of the deceased is verboten, but charging up front whether you will even need it or not is fine.
And for those of us who would commit suicide rather than go into such a place? Or have relatives who will look after us?
Non-payment of any such thievery and then die fighting and take as many of your foes with you as you can. Better by far than dribbling in some shithole.
The point is now being reached were enough is enough.
The scum are determined to steal every penny not to mention every scrap of peace and quiet enjoyment living in an advanced white Western society should bring. Those who have spent a lifetime working and want a peaceful and worthwhile old age are just another resource to be plundered.
It is increasingly obvious to anyone not a fool that the scum of the left and their allies won’t stop until we stop them.
And another good policy for the Fish Faced Cow to be putting forward –and at just the right time as ever. How fucking thick IS the treasonous bitch?
The problem is a common one.
Some politician promises wonderful things. Gets elected. Gets legislation in place.
Succeeding politicians have the choice of taking the wonderful things away (which would make them evil, grasping meanies), or find some way of providing them past the next election. The latter is the safe political course.
No politician is prepared to point out that Bevan’s scheme can only be afforded for a few decades. So endless ingenuity is applied to keeping it limping on a few more years.
This demographic time bomb has been ticking away for decades and no politician has the balls to tell it how it is.
We’re living longer. The old idea of 45 years of toil followed by maybe 10 in retirement has been replaced by 30 or more in retirement.
In some parts of the public sector – police, army, firefighters, it could be 30 years in work and 45 in retirement.
Sure, we can’t expect 70 year olds to fight fires but neither should they expect to be able to live comfortably for longer in retirement than they were in work.
People should be told that they either save like buggery from the moment they start working or that they may have to have at least a part time job so long as they are capable of doing so.
It’s not politics it’s simply finance and longevity.
But we haven’t the appetite for this.
I can see means tested state pensions, lump sums as suggested in the article and a lot more as the government scrabbles to take more and more from those with any drive just so they can support the bloated public sector and assorted life-failures.
More and more I anticipate retiring abroad.
“Hmm” indeed.
Is this some devious cunt planning for the removal of the 25% tax free pension lump sum – as that can now fund the levy instead?
Alternatively – the Government has legilated for employers to provide work place pensions, but which now in fact may not be directly for those who thought they were going to get the benefit.
“Fucking thick” or “treasonous”, surely? Oh, OK, both then… It certainly would appear that the current lot have lost their appetite for Government, and despite the appalling alternative eagerly waiting to take their place!
It’s another proposal to make transfer payments from the pruden, frugal and hard working (who will obviously be able to finance their own care) to the feckless.
Mind you I do not see why someone is able to pass on their home (as their only asset) to their children whilst being financed in care by everyone else.
Ecks: How fucking thick IS the treasonous bitch?
Very.
The people who would draw on the state for care are precisely those who would not have a lump sum to hand over in the first place.
Those with sufficient means would opt out of state provision because they could buy a better service unless the state had already sequestered their savings.
The idea of being forced to sell your house so that a platoon of surly social workers could administer suppositories to the elderly infirm in government facilities redolent of wee-wee will have little electoral appeal.
“This demographic time bomb has been ticking away for decades and no politician has the balls to tell it how it is.”
I beg to differ. Maggie used to bang on about it all the time, the problem was even her own side told her to shut up. If she’d had her way retirement ages would be well past 70 by now.
“I can see means tested state pensions”
My Lefttard brother floats this occasionally, saying Sociable Security should be means tested. My older brother explodes when he hears it, as we Americans are forced to pay into it, and benefits are rated to what you pay in.
Lefttard Brother just wants the money. He is devoid of character.
I assume that personal insurance has been discounted because it would be taken up by barely one half of the population, who would then also be taxed to pay for the remainder. Better to tax everyone … Oh, wait, the same poor schmucks are the only ones paying tax. You lose either way. I believe there are approximately 416,000 people living in care homes (2016 figures). This is 4% of the population aged 65 years and over, rising to 16% of those aged 85 or more. Given the odds are I’ll die in my own bed, you can stick your retirement/dementia tax where the sun don’t shine.
Gamecock: presumably your brother is also in favour of means testing before you’re allowed to take money out of your bank account. As ultimately, that is all a pension is.
And what about the payments made through life to the National Insurance Fund that was supposed to provide from ‘cradle to grave’?
That would be the fund of which Aneurin Bevan said,’The great secret about the National Insurance Fund is there ain’t no fund’.
Why would anyone believe there would actually be a ‘national care fund’ and that the ‘one-off payments’ wouldn’t just go to boost military spending, for example, which is what in fact happened to the National Insurance being collected after 1948?
Planet Money had a good podcast on what went wrong with this kind of product in the USA:
https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2018/01/24/580432527/a-long-term-bet-gone-bust
@ Everybody
The medical care provided in a residential care facility is or should be) funded by the NHS.
What the resident has to pay for (if he/she has some money) is the “hotel cost”. I do not believe there is any good reason why the median-income taxpayer should subsidise the “hotel cost” of an up-market residential care home for an elderly wealthy individual.
We subsidise those in genuine need – and there is already enough anger about the thrifty supporting those whose needs are self-inflicted bny wasting all their income on gambling or foreign holidays – but subsidising those who do NOT need it is offensive. To cap the amount that Jacob Rothschild could pay for care in a residential home as recommended by Dilnot sticks in my gullet.
Those who can afford it should be able to choose what quality of “Care Home” they pay for – and the rest of us should not have to pay for it. If I need residential care my pension will pay for it and the level of luxury will beadjusted to match my pension.
[My target is not pay a single £ for residential care by dropping dead as I cross the finish line of the London Marathon on my 100th birthday – but I doubt that I’ll get up Everest either]
Here’s an idea: everyone on their 18th or 21st birthday pays a “one-off” lump sum to cover future use of the NHS. Everyone fine with that?
Al Gore’s Social Security Lockbox was all make believe, too. SSA benefits are paid from current revenue. The rest of the money has been spent.
Governments are political. They’ll spend your retirement on windmills. Their goal is reelection, not your old age.
Money wont be needed to solve this alleged problem.
The government will introduce life rationing under the guise of fairness and equality.
Do not forget that abortions, hate laws, mass non white immigration, affirmative action, schooling in sodomy , attacks on the church, education , the army have all happened.
Expect discreet gas chambers coming the a community near you.
It will be a doddle for your leaders.
The generation who were sent to fight two world wars have now passed into history. We all owed them a massive debt of gratitude, and we probably didn’t honour that as well as we could have, but now they are gone. So what do we want to do for the aged cohort that follows, and why? We need some rational and objective criteria for why we support the aged, beyond the notion that they are wrinkly, eccentric and a bit venerable looking.
The oldies form a complete spectrum. At one end, the lifelong grafters who spent all their active lives supporting themselves, their families, and kicking in to fund the Treasury. At the other, the drones, who from birth to death have lived at public expense and raised two or three new generations to do the same, while they all recline on their arses proclaiming that ‘there’s no jobs’ and ‘working is a mug’s game, I’d be worse off if I was daft enough to get a job…’
The former have nothing to show for it now but their house, or some modest savings. The latter have nowt on paper, but significant amounts of sunk costs in terms of their housing and benefits and schooling and medical treatment and spells in prison, all at state expense.
Why would we insist on a common standard of support in old age for that entire cohort? Is it because of that notion of a welfare state that attends to our every need from cradle to grave? Well how come we closed all the loony bins and dumped their occupants into the worst sink estates in the UK? Parents of youngsters with severe mental illnesses are left high and dry in this utopia of ours. Seriously ill hospital patients are denied medicines that might extend their lives because an outfit called NICE deems them not cost-effective. We let ’em die. We already treat people as profit and loss centres, it’s just that we refuse to consider how helpful or burdensome they have actually been until, of course, we raid their estates after they die to harvest some inheritance tax.
We pay retirement pensions to folk who have never done a hand’s turn in their lives. Having squatted at your expense for years, the drones are now parasitising your children and grandchildren. That’s if you have any, because we have concocted a system in which evolutionary circumstances benefit only the fecund lowlife, at the ruinous expense of the diligent. We can all imagine how that pans out after a few generations when all the productive contributors have been bred out.
This isn’t working is it?
I would rather see the welfare state withdraw completely from elder social care. I’m not even that enamoured of the state pension and post-retirement age council housing except for folk with a reasonably solid contribution record.
What about the drones? Well the state has records of who their children are, and where they live. Let them accommodate, feed, and care for their own old folk with penalties for delinquency. That’s the thing about lifelong unemployment, you have no justification for offloading your crazy old parents and grandparents onto the state, and you are going to know that whatever steps you take to eliminate your silvery haired old mammy, will one day be used on you. And you’ll know precisely when….