To get annoyed when people try to avoid care costs

[paramedicswift]

People deserve good care in old care, potentially in their own home or in a care home.

While it is completely rational thing to do, people try avoid this cost by spending as much money as they can before they need this care or they give it away to family.

On one side, it is completely rational. I understand that people have paid taxes, national insurance and worked for their entire life. They have a desire to see this work to be passed onto their children for them to benefit from their hard work.

One the other side, it is incredibly entitled. To me, your care in old age is just another cost of life. It is like cost of food, cost of shelter. I wish I did not have to spend money on rent, food and travel to work. But I have to. This is just life.

It makes me even more angry when family inheritances come into it. It is just so greedy and horrible. I do not know why it is unacceptable to some people to apply for benefits and never work but completely acceptable to avoid paying for social care.

It is a bit of tragedy of commons because if everyone did it, then taxes would be wasted on caring for old people that COULD HAVE afforded the care themselves rather than important things such as education for children, public infrastructure projects and healthcare that benefit everyone.

To everyone according to their need. If someone cannot genuinely afford old age care and they did not deliberately avoid the costs, then I have no problems with state subsidised care.

Am I being unreasonable?

It would take a Solomon to solve this. One person hands £30K to his children, the other hands £30K to SAGA for a few cruises. Why is the first person avoiding care home fees and the other not?

I think that in the future homes will have to be built that can take bulk old people, with basic, good care but few frills. If you want better, then you have to pay. There would be no question of the state paying for someone to be in the same home as someone paying £4K a month as is the case at the moment. People say money brings choice, but only an awful lot of money brings choice. Those fancy homes with trips out and cocktail hour cost an absolute bomb and are out of the reach of people with assets, but only modest ones. The alternative is, I suppose, is to check into a really nice home when you still can appreciate it and then when you run out of money ship into one which accepts council-funded patients; hopefully by this time you won't notice where you are.

Ptolemy That does happen, but the authorities check for disposal of assets in the last few years, e.g. banks, Land Registry.
I believe there is an annual tax-free limit on gifts. This needs to be about 10k per person per year imo, then treated as ordinary income, to avoid people disposing too blatantly of assets

What happens if the LA decides that someone has disposed of their assets? If all the money someone had has gone on holidays and fine dining and there is no way to recover that money?

Spending on yourself does not count of disposal of assets, even a 100k 7* hotels & luxury world cruise every few months. That is a commercial contract.
However, the local council will want to see that money went to a recognised firm, not your family, before they pay for care.

Oh ok, thanks.

It's things like that that seem so unfair though. You can spend your money on frivolous crap and have your care paid for, but you can't help your own children get on the housing ladder without being penalised for it. The system is ridiculous.

It is unfair, but no different to benefits during working age:
2 people on same salary get made redundant, one has scrimped and saved to get 50k in the bank; the other has 50p and qualifies for benefits immediately.
When people are old & frail, too late to say they should have behaved differently. They can't suddenly go out to work

Or we keep reading here from mums who can't afford another kid they desperately want, but their neighbour on benefits has had her 4th.

I wish I knew of a really fair way, but the Welfare State is the least bad system.

Exactly, the injustice goes all the way through the system. And as long as that continues, people will continue to look at ways to minimise their tax liability and to ensure that they get the help they need from the state should they end up needing it.

It's foolish to try to avoid care costs by e.g. transferring your home to your children or into a trust.

Not only does this not work - intentional deprivation of assets etc. but worse still, it means that you turn your back on support available to you from the local authority.

For example even if you are a self-funder, the local authority has a discretion to help you by means of the deferred payment scheme.

Under this scheme (which may not be universal), the local authority takes a charge over your home and in return, pays the difference between the fees and your income. They pay interest free until you die or the house is sold, whichever happens first.

Interestingly too, when you use the deferred payment scheme, even though you are privately funding, the local authority is paying the fees in the first instance. And in my experience, the local authority is only prepared to pay at the local authority rate, which, in a nursing home like my mum's is around £750 a week, even on the basis of a loan. The private rate is £950. Using the deferred payment scheme, my mum gets the local authority rate even though she is a private funder. There is no provision to claim the difference from her, either now or when she dies, and no requirement for her to top up the difference.

Really, you have to understand the system, which is very complicated and sadly is not uniform all across the country, but whatever your ethical standpoint, it really does not pay to try to avoid care fees.

The deferred payment scheme is only available once your assets (excluding your home) have fallen below around £24,000.

Slightly off topic but personally id happily sign a legal document now, detailing that should i develop dementia, alzheimers etc i would want to be medically euthanised instead of being placed in a care home or alike.

I've spent far too much time in these places and plan on never living in one myself. Id much prefer my children benefitted from my savings and didnt have to visit me until i reached the age of 90 (by which point i probably wouldnt have a clue who they were).

Yes, it's another topic but dementia is a slow-burning condition and by the time you've developed it you're beyond deciding to do away with yourself. Mil, when diagnosed, refused to believe it and with fil as her enabler wouldn't listen to anybody, let alone about any financial or - heaven forbid - care . As for end of life - no way! Poor old fil still thinks she's going to recover. We are all terrified of a cure being found: mil will go ballistic if she finds her home as been sold - and as for her Lladro ornaments....

In response to the OP. There is a difference between clinical care and social care for the elderly. Advanced dementia is a clinical mental health issue. If a younger person were so incapacitated they would be cared for under the NHS free of charge. This should be also so for an elderly person. Many many health conditions elderly people suffer are clinical and this is what the NHS should be there for.

This ^^

My mum had dementia, a medical condition. This meant that she could not look after herself, she needed 24 hr supervision or else she was in danger of wandering about and having a fall/ setting fire to her home whilst trying to cook/going out and not being able to find her way home & a million other examples, I am sure you all get the picture. The reason she needed this supervision was a medical one, caused entirely by her condition. So why wasn't her care funded as a medical need? Yes, she still needed to pay her living costs, but she had paid off her mortgage on the house by then so had she not got dementia she would not have had rent to pay, her care home provided an extensive menu of lovely food which she hardly touched because of her condition- if she were still of sound mind she would have been capable of eating much more cheaply as she could buy stuff she liked and in portions to suit just one person. So all the living costs she was forced to pay for once she went into care where a lot higher than if she had not had dementia and had been able to stay at home. That is the problem with care costs, they remove choices and you end up with costs which you would not have had if you had been able to stay in your own home. And the reason for all that, as I keep saying, is a medical condition- dementia utterly sucks. Our best hope to finding a solution to the care situation is to find a cure for the bastard!

When I first started looking at care homes for my mum, who has had dementia for around eight years (and now has continuing care), what I was most thankful for was that she owned her own home, so that she had at least some choice. Where I was looking, this made a very big difference.

But it's really just old age. Just like your eyesight failing, or hearing... it's your brain furring up (in layman's terms). We do not go on forever. You might as well demand immortality. Alzheimer's, on the other hand, is an illness and can strike relatively young people.

The state has no money, just what we pay in taxes.

If you want personal care funded in full for everyone, then that would require a huge increase in income tax or massive cuts in other public expenditure.
Would anyone vote for either ?

I wouldn't mind paying more tax if it were spent wisely and fairly, I only object to paying more tax because I can't trust that it will be spent well, so I'd rather keep as much of my own money as possible to benefit my own family.

I just think its a sad shame that you can have two people in the same care home, one that has never saved and always lived in rented (council?) property and either has a low paid job or lived on Benefits Street - and the other who has worked hard, bought their own property hoping to leave an inheritance for their children, perhaps one that they never had themselves, but had to sell their house in order to fund the care fees.

I think that when it is free for some and not for others, and your life at the end is judged on how you lived during your prime is a very unfair system and I would encourage anybody who has the assets to be liable for their own fees to seek advice from an IFA.

But it's really just old age. Just like your eyesight failing, or hearing... it's your brain furring up (in layman's terms). We do not go on forever. You might as well demand immortality. Alzheimer's, on the other hand, is an illness and can strike relatively young people.

But hip and knee replacement are mostly due to old age too. The NHS picks up the cost for those. I don't think you can just shrug and say 'it is just old age' and then leave people to sort things out themselves. Would a young person with Alzheimers be more deserving of care than an old person?

admit I haven't read all of the posts above but when my father had Alzheimers and had to go into care I was very grateful that my parents had lived a frugal life, saved etc., and with his pension we had enough money to be able to CHOOSE where he went and me and my sister were in control of his money with a Power of Attorney. If he needed anything extra we were able to pay for it. I think any savings and/property should be used first to care for the elderly and if there is anything left afterwards then good - but if you have to rely on social care to fund everything then you have little choice of where to go and will have to fight to get everything you needd. I would rather sell my house and have to use the money first to look after me and my DH if it comes to that.

If people fiddle the care system, then taxes WILL rise, a lot, not just a couple of pence.
It's a consequence, not a choice.
Every public service is paid by our taxes. There is no magic pot of gold.

Alternatively, we could have insurance-only systems for benefits, health, care ..
And riots and revolutions from desperate people.

The NHS provides medical treatment, but it wasn't set up or funded for long term care for millions of elderly people. This is a new demographic situation.

People spending their own (already taxed) money is not fiddling the system.

I don't know about the legalities and the ins and outs but in my one and only experience of care I was devastated that my grandad had to spend thousands of his own money on it.

My nan had dementia, but was taken to hospital for Pnemonia, she was recovering so they discharged her and sent her to a home. She was only there for a few weeks but it cost my grandad £3,000!! The home was dirty, noisy and very crowded. We all felt she would have been better at home and I couldn't quite get my head around the fact that my 85 yr old grandad was spending his money on that, my nan was never going to overcome the illness, in my mind he should have kept it for himself and nan should have been at home in the peace and warmth.

Perhaps my point is it's ok to spend our own money on it, if you can guarantee quality care. However, if in like my experience, you are spending thousands on somewhere neither you or your family want you to be, it's a devastating way for an OAP to spend their last bit of money!

I just think its a sad shame that you can have two people in the same care home, one that has never saved and always lived in rented (council?) property and either has a low paid job or lived on Benefits Street - and the other who has worked hard, bought their own property hoping to leave an inheritance for their children, perhaps one that they never had themselves, but had to sell their house in order to fund the care fees.

Why equate buying own property with hard work?
I am in no position to save, live hand to mouth and rent a council house. I also work extremely hard and very long hours in a low paid job. With no security, sick pay or guaranteed hours. I pay all my own bills and claim nothing. So sick of seeing home ownership equated with hard work. Many mothers of my parents generation never worked once they had children and we're just lucky to see house prices go up so much.
After all once in care or nursing they are unlikely to go home and avoiding fees is more to do with inheritance.
Why should I fund the care of those who were so lucky to benefit from the circumstances of plenty of jobs and housing boom?

Maybe those who have little savings were in low paid jobs. And worked hard in them. Care and nursing for one!

If everyone who has money transfers it to their children/grandchildren to avoid care costs then those same children/grandchildren will either be paying massive amounts of tax to support everyone who needs funded care, or the system of state funding will collapse.

We need wide-ranging public discussions on how to pay for care, NHS, pensions etc. We need to establish what level of care people want and how much they are willing to pay (in tax) for it. Yes, there will always be people who pay more tax and some people who pay hardly anything or nothing at all due to circumstances - but if we want to consider ourselves a civilised society then we need to ensure basic levels of provision.