Skip to content

Here’s an interesting solution

Some problems are intractable because there are too many competing interests. Some are hard to solve because they’re hard to predict. And then there’s social care, which is very straightforward. It may be terrifying to plot our ageing population’s needs into the future – local authorities used to call it “the graph of doom” – but it’s not difficult. All a government needs to do is to work out how to pay for it.

How about, umm, not having government pay for it?

10 thoughts on “Here’s an interesting solution”

  1. All a government needs to do is to work out how to pay for it.

    The problem we have right now is that those paying their own way are usually the ones that scrimped and saved their entire lives to buy a house and who are now having to either sell said house to pay the care fees or some other form of equity release. Not only that, but the private fees that they pay include an element of cross-subsidy to those whose fees are paid for through public funds (national or local).

    Joe Pancrack who has spunked every paycheque up the wall since his first job and lived in a council flat, pays nothing because he has no income and no assets.

    It seems to me that the correct response is to tell Joe Pancrack to get stuffed, which in turn removes the cross subsidy problem since there are no more public cases requiring subsidy. Now sure, that’s a bit hard on Joe Pancrack, but actions have consequences.

  2. Winter and the return of seasonal respiratory disease will be interesting. Did the jab prime people for ADE or not, an ongoing experiment.

  3. The complaint that freeloaders freeload on the taxpayer is a bit silly. The welfare state was reformed by the Labour government in 1945 to bring about exactly that outcome. People have voted to keep that design of welfare state ever since. No bloody use complaining now.

  4. An important detail is how much of the cost of care is actually tax. At the extreme, what would the cost of care be if no tax were payable anywhere in the cycle? Dramatically lower. And yet, all the policy initiatives seem to be heading in the opposite direction.

  5. If they make the Covid vaccine mandatory for care workers, there won’t be enough care workers, so no care homes, so no care home fee crisis to pay for.
    Problem sorted.
    Next!

  6. Bloke in North Dorset

    LJH,

    No need to wait for winter, RSV is off the scale:

    https://twitter.com/GJohnGarrett/status/1417970102671192069?s=20

    Already >3x the past 5 year’s peak and still rising.

    Elsewhere a “Paediatric Registrar | Clinical Research Fellow Paediatric Infectious Diseases ” Tweets:

    “If you are hearing there are no PICU beds in England because of COVID-19, that is untrue

    Last time I checked my hospital does not have any COVID-19 patients in PICU at all

    We are very busy with other respiratory viruses, but not COVID-19”

    https://twitter.com/apsmunro/status/1417922565830500359

  7. I want to be able afford to stay alive when I’m older and nobody is prepared to pay me to work, so I defer my present spending by putting some of my current income into a pension to provide an income in future.

    I want to be able to get my bum wiped when I’m decrepit and cannot do it for myself, so GOVERNMENT!!!!!!

  8. Zoe Williams does not even know that there is a lower threshold for National insurance contributions and she does not know what “flat rate” means.
    She thinks an Inheritance Tax is “fair” YMBJ
    Quite recently I read another leftie complaining about how the really rich avoid IHT through various schemes (e.g. the Duke of Westminster is only entitled to the income from the endowment so no IHT is payable on its capital value).
    What *would* be fair is a requirement that local authorities pay the cost of those it places with care homes.

  9. And then there’s social care, which is very straightforward.

    But its not straightforward because

    Some problems are intractable because there are too many competing interests.

    Even the idea that the future costs are predictable is crap – because that prediction is based on the desires and assumptions of just one set of competing interests.

    Even at the extreme, there’s a limit to how much people are willing to do without in order for someone else’s grandma to do with.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *