There’s a debate raging about how to pay more for ‘social care’, but it’s mainly a debate about how to pay for the largest cost, which is the price of residential care. A year in residential care can easily cost £40-50,000. It’s residential care that is most likely to eat up all a persons’s savings, along with the value of their house.
Unfortunately, the finance of residential care has been based in a deeply exploitative model, and the conduct of a few of the largest providers, while legal, is open to question in terms of the use of funds, the stability of the operation, and the quality of the service provided. I’d recommend a critical report from 2016 by Burns and others, called Where does the money go? They explain how a complex series of financial transactions have been used to milk the system of money, and most of it finishes in tax havens. Operational companies, which actually provide the care, are separated from property companies, which charge them rent. The operational companies are loaded with debt at excessive rates of interest, paid to finance companies. Management services are subcontracted to other companies within the group. And so it goes on. The authors comment:
Putting more money in to the system via higher weekly payments per bed will not produce a robust and sustainable care home sector when the financialised providers are so adept at taking money out.