Fed up of reading threads asking how they can get out of paying care home fees.

[Nextdoortomeis]

As per the title.
I'm sure lots of people would like the state to pay care home fees.
But we don't live in a fair world.
Both mum and mil paid nearly £70k in fees
yes I didn't want to pay but I also wanted them to get the best care in their later years.

Worse because the people paying are subsidising those who the council is paying for because the homes charge more to offset the discounts/lower charges demanded by the councils.

I would rather be permitted to use assisted dying and leave my money to my children and grand children. If i'm denied that by the state then they can bloody well pay for me if they're that keen for me to languish in a care home against my will.

So many posts I agree/disagree with!

Mil and fil were the poster boys for healthy living: five a day, Benecol, statins, exercise etc etc. But they both suffered from dementia, and then all their good health was not a blessing as to live for years doubly incontinent with no clue who you or your dcs are is terrible. Agree with pp that the Hippocratic oath demanded that they were sent off to hospital every time they fell ill, were pumped full of antibiotics, and then returned to their nursing home - again and again. The DNR is for heart attacks etc, not treatable illnesses.

On the subject of paying, NO you do not necessarily get to go in one of those Thursday Murder Club-type homes if you are paying. Mil was violent and a “screamer”. Only one place would accept her. And she was the only one there who was self-funding. That being said, the staff were kind but it was very shabby (and rather smelly :( ).

So yes, it’s the unfairness that rankles. Take a quarter, half, three quarters even of someone’s assets, but the pil used their (modest) home, savings, and when fil died he had just dipped below the £23k threshold.

The rich (who I define as those with £10 million plus worth of assets) are paying nowhere near the proportion of tax most workers pay on the wages they get for their labour, on their assets, which is where most of their wealth is. We need to tax wealth, not work. Otherwise our society will become more and more unequal.

ETA what I mean by rich

If you want to leave your children a house then you have to buy them a separate house, paying for your own house is for you to live in and then when you cannot look after yourself for someone else to look after you. Some people get inheritance some don’t that’s the luck of the family you are born into!

MIL is paying a horrific amount for care at home atm. She is probably entitled to more free care on her pathway, but it is impossible to get through to the powers that be. We pay a fuckton in tax and then will again when she passes in inheritance tax.
It's purely profit making as the carer will not be receving anything like MIL pays the agency.

It's obviously worth it to her because it means staying in her own home. My mum in law stayed at home and I'm glad she did, she felt secure and it gave her comfort.

I sold my house to my son quite cheaply. I now have a modern two bed flat, don't have to worry about maintenance.

Did you have Lasting Power of Attorney for health for your DM @LondonJax ?
If so, and if she'd consented while she still had capacity, it would have been possible to intervene and decline "treatment" on her behalf.
Someone has to be the one to start the conversation about "nature taking its course" and, in my experience, the professionals are very reluctant to be the ones who raise it for fear of being accused of all sorts of horrors.
Sorry for your loss.

The deprivation of assets rule did not come in till 2014 - that is how this family got away with it.

Do not try this at home, as the rule has now changed. It came in in 2014 and states that the LA can look back as far as they want - there is no limit. You have been warned!!

I had PofA for my OH. I refused for him to go from nursing home to hospital for treatment with antibiotics. At the time he was immobile, paranoid and living a life of terror. My decision was honoured; and indeed all professionals agreed with me. But if I had not intervened they would have felt obliged to treat him.

A future care plan would be usual for someone admitted to a care home. For my Nanna we said nothing life prolonging and the only way she would have gone to hospital would have been for treatment filling an injury/fall. Anything that extended her life was a no.

I would rather be dead than go into a home- I feel really strongly about this but not sure how I can make it reality if that makes sense

You can’t really. The vast majority of people in homes right now have probably said this too.

The ratios are far from 1 to 1 though. Each resident doesn't get their own 24/7 carer, in fact they're left sitting for hours staring into space with no meaningful interaction with anyone (and in their own wee, quite often). And they don't get the equivalent of a flat or anything, they get one, very small room and only shared toilets. So they're not paying for high end accommodation or food.

If you look at the accounts of many care home chains there are dividends paid to shareholders (in the millions sometimes) and sometimes the private equity companies involved get into debt and vast fees are spent on servicing debt rather than providing care, which some say is a way of moving money around - i.e. the people charging high interest on loans are getting all the money funnelled to them. This is a bit of an old report but outlines some of the issues. Care homes: Following the money trail - BBC News

We need more really good investigative journalists looking into this.

My DM has one to one care at night.

This 👆🏻

anyone living the reality of mid to late stage dementia care (years long) will likely agree with you.

My fit and healthy uncle decided to stop working when he was 30. He's 65 now. He just didn't want to work.

He has managed to stay on a mixture of the dole and sick for the last 35 years. He mixes with other long term unemployed to learn about every trick in book to get what he can.

He managed his money. Read the papers for free at the library. Used free internet at library and got as many concessions as he could for swimming and yoga. He was lazy just didn't want to work. He would put on an Oscar winning performance when he was assessed for sick pay.

He used the dental hospital for free dental care a she didn't work he didn't mind waiting for hours and multiple trips so he has great teeth.

He was lucky in that he inherited council tenancy in nice area.

He has now been moved to a bungalow by the council . They paid and arranged his move. Gave him money for paint etc.

If he residential care he will get this for free as he has no assets.

There are thousands like him. Many in the Borough I live in.

I agree that you should pay for your own care however to find yourself in the same home as someone who has never worked all their life (willingly) getting everything for free hits hard. It's not equitable but I don't know the solution

As long as people feel they don’t get justice from society, those that can will always seek ways to minimise what the government can take when they die or need care. If people didn’t have to watch while those they love suffer on NHS waiting lists, or struggle to find a decent job, and their children could get the education they deserve etc, then they would be willing to pay into the system. The biggest kicker is that being self funding doesn’t guarantee better can and it means paying for other people. It’s madness to expect people to want to be part of that system.

The councils can go back as far as they like looking for deprivation of assets, but what can they really do about grandparents downsizing and going on lots of holidays or paying off their family’s student debts and helping them with a house deposit? Those are just normal things that people do when they can.

Why extortion?

What baffles me is the amount of people that seem to think paying through the nose for fees = better care.
In my 20plus years working in care and now as a LA inspector I can, hand on heart, tell you it has very little to do with it. I have been to countless top range homes and the staff have been very close to criminal in their neglect.
Some establishments know how to glitter a steaming pile shal we say.

I did @Wingedharpy - but didn't know I could do that. I assumed it was more for the 'she needs treatment' rather than the 'withhold it'. Just shows you don't always know as much as you think you do! Thank you for that. It may come in useful for someone else.

It’s a really tricky one but how can the state indefinitely pay for care with the population ageing? I can see both sides. A parent has just gone into a home which is £2,500 per week. It’s going to tear through their savings. They lived frugally and carefully their whole life and retired at 70 (in a home a decade later) but at least it is going on their care which should be bloody good at that price!

I hope, if it comes to it, my parents sell
their house and get themselves a nice care home and see out their final years as comfortably as possible

This thread is so depressing. Can we stop assuming that everyone who gets LA funded care “pissed it up the wall” or never worked, or scrounged off the state all their lives?!
Both my parents worked all their lives but neither had well paying jobs and with three children money was tight. They didn’t have money to put aside for their care but they did manage to buy a modest house. They were decent, hardworking people and wonderful caring parents. Both had to go into nursing homes towards the end of their lives, my father first. And because my mum was still living in the family home and they had very little savings, the LA funded his care costs because obviously you can’t kick an old lady out of her home and force her to sell it to pay for her husband’s care home!
Then when my mum declined, the family home had to be sold to pay for her fees. It didn’t last very long at over £1000 a week, and then the LA funding kicked in.
I wish that they’d been sitting on a home in the south east worth over £1 million as a lot of people are, and could have self-funded years of care - but in our area houses aren’t worth anything like that, so I’m very sorry they had to cost the tax payer a bit of money when theirs ran out. However, it was certainly not because they were a couple of feckless layabouts who scrounged off the state all their lives, an assumption on this thread that seems quite common and that I find quite offensive.
People also seem to forget that if you are self-funding then you get a much greater choice of where you spend your final years. You don’t get to choose when the LA is paying. We got given a list from the LA of the nursing homes that had spaces and the right type of care for mum, and we could pick a maximum of three to go and view. ALL of them cost more than the LA could pay and that’s what we could choose from. Didn’t matter whether mum liked them or not, it was “tough shit, this is all we can offer you, take it or leave it”.
My sister was a senior social worker and thank goodness she was, because she had some “inside” knowledge about some of the homes on the list, and there were some that she said she’d never put Mum in.
Nobody should be made to live somewhere where they’re not happy, or not treated well in the last years of their lives, and if you can afford to self-fund then you’re very lucky that you’ll never have to.
So all in all, having the state pay for your fees isn’t some sort of fantastic reward that scroungers get at the end of their lives, that some people on this thread seem to think it is.

24 hour supervision means its family or a care home. There are no free care homes, someone is always paying. Other residents or taxpayers.