AIBU to think a 10% inheritance levy for social care is fairer?

We definitely need to fund social care of the elderly to stop bed blocking if nothing else

and everyone paying is the fairest / at the moment it’s an advantage to stick the elderly in a home if the state foots the bill which it does for the majority where I live. Losing some inheritance might make it more likely they will be encouraged (by family and their own wishes) to stay in their own home especially if the own home care is better due to better funding.

People in care homes are molly coddled (or the home is criticised) so they live on and on. A miserable existence imv. In their own home they have some autonomy.
10% across the board is best. The poor pay something and the rich pay more.

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Elderly care in Sweden is largely funded by municipal taxes and government grants, with the user only paying a small fraction of the costs, typically around 4-6%. The system is designed to provide publicly subsidized services based on individual needs, ensuring universal coverage.

Re the boomers and having to 'get them to pay' as someone said earlier - bear in mind that if you make sure boomers don't have much to leave to people then it's millennials you're punishing, not boomers. The boomers will be dead. Fair enough to take a good slice in IHT but gleefully wiping out the savings completely of one subset of the boomers who need care while leaving others with plenty to leave will only affect millennials.

The other thing no one's mentioned is the billions of pounds of unpaid care provided usually by women. Another side effect of fewer working age adults to fund things with tax is fewer working age adults to take time out of working for unpaid caring duties. With the best will in the world even families from cultures that pride themselves on doing all the caring themselves are going to find that harder in the future. Not sure what the answer is.

Insurance schemes are good for spreading the risk of catastrophic costs, whatever the kind. Pay a premium, and you'll never have to find the money to rebuild your house from scratch if it burns down. Pay for private health insurance and/or pay NI and you'll never have to find the money to fund your own cancer treatments. Not having to pay either of those also leaves people with more money to pass on to their children, and yet we don't put a charge or whatever on their house or bank account to get payments back from their estate later.

If the stats are so definite about only a certain fraction of us ever needing significant amounts of nursing care, then insurance of some kind probably makes sense. So pay a fixed amount and you'll still have to pay quite a few costs (and always food and accommodation costs), but never the really catastrophic ones. Equally, it might turn out that you never would have had any costs, and just like those years and years of home and contents insurance premiums, all you'll have had out of it is peace of mind. Seems fair enough.

Surely the only thing that matters is whether the premiums are sufficient to cover the collective payouts. No idea if 10% like this would be enough. It would probably make sense for it to be on a sliding scale.

I would be really happy to pay something like that just as I'm happy to pay for house insurance. I'm also happy for IHT to come out of my estate.

Putting a certain percentage of my money into the common pot knowing others may well take more out of that than I ever will doesn't bother me. Putting ALL my money in while others (with similar financial resources to me) put nothing in - having my entire life savings and pension wiped out paying inflated fees at a nursing home because private patients are needed to subsidize non-private patients (and to help private equity firms make profits) - really would.

That's not sharing the cost (of caring for people with no savings) across the whole population, that's focusing it very directly on a small number of people who also happen to need care, and viewing their particular savings as available to spend for this 'common good', but not other people's savings. I'm not sure why that's fair.

Yes, so why is that a problem?

Not even spouses... anyone who is still living in the home that is due IHT.
I said upthread about someone who lived with her father, and she inherited the house when he died. She is on benefits and could not afford to pay 10% to stay in the home she has lived in for decades.

Generally I think this is fair - with one exception. ATM there is no tax for a wife or husband. If the surviving partner needs to find 5% of assets on the death of spouse, it could cause severe hardship. 5% assumes partners own all money equally, so 5% of everything owned. The house (usually the greatest asset) may have to be sold. Pensions are now part of the pot - what happens to spouses pension?

There would need to be an exemption for a spouse to inherit or the tax would need to be deferred until the second death. And any interest should be restricted to inflation, not the punitive rate HMRC use.

They have fewer people in a contentious for profit sector. What is the point of introducing a social care tax if it is just lining the pockets of investors?

Sweden's for profit elderly care sector is every bit as much up for debate over whether it is fit for purpose as ours.

Broken is broken. Simply pouring more money into a broken system doesn't fix it.

Private equity isn't flocking to the care sector because it cares.

How much direct care is by for profit companies?

People are told they can't leave more to their children because:
a. Their assets should fund their care
and
b. Even if that care isn't needed, it's supposedly unfair on those who will inherit nothing.

Yet a large proportion of that money paid for care ultimately ends up being paid to profit-maximising, for-profit care companies. Some are backed by private equity, that has complex tax structures, and pays salaries that require government top ups, whilst profits flow out of the country thought complex tax structures.

Seems fair...

Not with inhertance tax. It has been abolished.

An examination of where the money the NHS receives goes should precede anything. Are all those jobs on the non-direct medical side really necessary? I would like to see a breakdown of the % spent on direct patient care against the % spent on non-direct care.

Exactly how did ‘Boomers’ unfairly annex wealth? Pension ages have risen, final salary pensions ended apart from the public sector affecting those born towards the end of the Baby Boom period. House prices have risen because too few have been built for decades. I would prefer house prices hadn’t risen by so much because my DC are struggling to afford to buy or rent. Government policy over the last 4 decades has caused a lot of these problems (m
ost of the last 45 years the Tories were in power). Eg selling off social housing.

People who can will just give their kids money early on ( to aim for 7 years before death) it’s human nature to want to secure your offspring’s future as much as you can. Some people do it through private education is that not their right to do that either?

It isn’t fair. The state chooses to spend money on illegal immigrants, benefit fraudsters and nonsense leaving nothing for people who work hard and pay their taxes. Before someone quotes me please bear in mind that I have worked in the public sector for the last 30 years. This country is run poorly by people who are not seeing what the majority of people are seeing on a daily basis.

What makes it unfair is that a single parent who’s struggled to bring up children and buy a modest house will loose everything outright if they need care. So those kids that grew up at an arguable disadvantage with only parent are disadvantaged again. If one person in a couple needs care the other stays in the house and it won’t be used to pay fees. If you’re over 60 and live with a parent who goes into care the house isn’t sold. The system if full of injustices and it needs looking at.

It would be interesting to know how Sweden or Norway fund elderly care?

Your examples are not comparable. They were not constructed expressly to protect money for inheritance.

I would be interested in understanding where that figure comes from as I received nothing from my deceased parents. Neither did my brother. My partner has received nil, and so has his brother.

I think they do anyway . They’d might not bother for ten percent though

Inheritance is very different to the costs involved raising a child. The majority of those expecting inheritance are full adults who no longer need raising.

You can 'want' to give money to your kids but unfortunately it's not a right. If you have stuff you need to pay for then... well you pay for it.

But as I said earlier, you could use all your money on a care home (for accommodation, food, laundry etc) because only the "care" part is provided and then lose 10% after death, so there'll be even less left to heirs.