@UntilYourNextHairBrainedScheme
In "the good old days" and many countries where there is no social care, elderly and profoundly physically disabled people and those with severe chronic illness were often kept in bed all day every day until they died, brought and fed meals and cleaned up once per day. When one woman had a very elderly or ill or profoundly physically disabled dependent, a clutch of small children and a household to run this was usually the most she could manage and considered normal. We now understand that this is inhumane, and completely unacceptable - but most families cannot earn two incomes and look after their very elderly relatives once they get to the stage of needing social care.
What's changed is that the care provided to generations who died fifty years ago would be regarded as elderly abuse now, and that due to better care and better medical management of geriatric chronic illness people are surviving in extremely poor health for years and years longer than fifty years ago.
Yes this.
I work in elderly social care and 25 years ago I was caring for people in their 70's and 80's, a few in their 90's and someone over a hundred was not quite rare but certainly not common, and the level of care needed was not as it is now. Now it's 80's and 90's and people over 100 are not the novelty they used to be. There's also far more people with dementia, and chronic conditions that need a lot of care, and a mindset of keeping people going as long as possible, doing whatever you can to achieve that, regardless of the quality of life that delivers. We don't like to talk about death and people dying being inevitable, it's a taboo subject for many, morbid and offensive.
It's also not really the done thing to talk about how much that costs financially either, but in very simple terms, more people need more care and there's less money to provide it, and no one wants to foot the bill, people don't want to lose their inheritance, no one wants to pay more tax (me included because I am already on a knife edge financially) the government don't want to invest in it and yet the demands for care and how it should be delivered are high (as they should be).
It's not feasible for people to provide the levels of care I am in a home, with equipment, staff, medical back up and a purpose designed building at home in between their own lives, especially as the cost of living is high and people need to work as much as physically possible in generally inflexible ways. People generally don't understand the depth of care that's needed to keep someone safe, watered, fed and clean - just the basics - on a daily basis when they can't asses risk for themselves, when they no longer know how to use a spoon, when they can't walk or express what they need at any given time.
I see people in their 70's and 80's doing this for spouses, and both are suffering and in need of help. I see family members juggling children, ft jobs and homes doing this, until it becomes too much and they can't carry on. I also see families just wanting to get 'the problem' dealt with and not wanting to be responsible at all for their relatives, and not change their own lives in the slightest to offer even minimal support, and asking why they should be responsible.
I don't really know who's responsibility it is. Is it the family? Or society? Or the government?
With this announcement, it'd seem that the government are pushing it back towards family to take the responsibility, because in effect, the money spent that social care is a black hole that no one wants to put their money into.