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.

"A lifetimes scrimping and saving to pay the mortgage, bills and repairs and the person in the next room was there at the taxpayers expense" - but what about the benefit of living in your and your families' home for decades - unless someone owns several houses, are alruistic people buying houses they don't use for decades to pay for care?

They may in princioalbut they're not going to prove doa if a healthy parent signed a house over a decade ago

I used to work in a care home and the self funders with a certain amount of capacity were often furious at the amount they were paying for their care. Extremely bitter and unhappy

It's not "extortion", it's paying a proper rate for all the staffing costs and other overheads needed to look after a group of vulnerable people.
And of course the company has to make a profit - why should they do it for nothing?

It's written in to the care act but implementation has been postponed because of the cost to the public purse if it were introduced.

Plus it only covers cost of CARE. Rent, food, social activities, utilities etc don't come in to it. So care homes would need to provide a breakdown of what the care element costs and what is everything else. So the cap would still mean people spending £££ on overall care costs.

I can see it from both sides. It can be extremely hard to sell the family home to pay for care. Especially, when your elderly parents went through tough times in order to purchase the home.

I know my parents wanted to keep the family home, so it was passed on and could stay within the family. It can be hard for them to accept that they must sell it, all the while watching people who have made poor financial decisions/ chosen not work/ play the system get care for free.

Right now life is not fair if you do the right thing. It happens when there is an expectation that young adults pay for uni for most of their adult lives but those that did not go can claim benefits from 18 but do not have to pay a penny back when their circumstances improve. It doesn't seem right.

However, care must be paid for and I understand it is expensive and the better the care home the more expensive it is. How care is funded needs to be reassessed as the current model is not working well.

There's very fancy care homes that cost incredible amounts, if you are in an average care home and are funding it yourself you're basically covering the person who is state funded next to you. It's not like private hospitals or private schools, you're getting the same as everyone else unless you are in the Eton of care homes. So I can understand why people aren't incentivised to save for future care.

It's based on a misunderstanding about medicine and history, I think. We live longer but not in good health. Previously the whole issue would not have arisen, because heart attacks and strokes were almost always fatal and happened before dementia. It's millions of statin prescriptions keeping people alive into their 80s and 90s. OTOH, how nice, only not really.

Awful. I wish this could be exposed more. I didn't realise they were that bad. It's disgraceful.

If you want to put your property in a trust for your DC, take legal advice, do it properly and do it now. Now. Ours was done as soon as DS was 18 and we were 50. Twelve years later he has forgotten all about it, we are in perfect health and hopefully he won't benefit for 20+years. And as it was all so long ago no one would ever challenge it as deliberate deprivation.

You're not at all unreasonable but I have to say I haven't seen many threads about that.

It's not a given that you'll get free care for cancer. You'll get free treatment and you'll get some care whilst receiving that treatment but if you have long term care needs due to cancer, you'll likely have to self fund for that care.

Yes, some people are eligible for CHC (NHS funded care) but it is few and far between.

Yes. Yet if you don't want to take statins but your GP has suggested it, you can't refuse because then you wouldn't be able to get life insurance or travel insurance. No point in not mentioning it in your application because the t&c include authorisation to access your GP records.
I didn't want my cholesterol checked when I had my other, necessary blood tests done, but they did it anyway. So I fully expect to be tipped into the statin trap in due course. Of course the side effects can be debilitating.

I think there's a link to the right to die. My parents are adamant they don't want to ever be in care or have their children care for them. For my Mum in particular, it's her worst fear, not because of the money but because she just hates the thought of being dependent on others. She has said many times that she wants to choose euthanasia over that, and I do worry that she would decide to go to Switzerland before whilst she's fit enough to get there without help, meaning her life would end prematurely, rather than risk getting to the point she needs help.

It seems massively unfair that you could be forced to pay for your last years when you didn't want to live them, not that way anyway.

There comes a point with dementia where they need 24hr care, just like a baby.
They need changing, they lose the ability to be reasoned with, sometimes violent. Even the most placid person can become violent and want to go out in the middle of the night

There is a limit to what individuals can cope with.

The Government is proposing an alternative and many agree with them. It will be cheaper once we have the convenience of legalised euthanasia and we can avoid the cost care homes. 🤔

True. If you need carers you still need to pay. And cleaners, anything else you can't do because of illness.

If care homes vary their fees for the same care according to the Resident's assets, then surely the answer is for the LA to be the commissioner of care home places so the prices are not inflated. The LA could then recoup the costs from self-funding residents and their assets or lack thereof would be of no relevance to the care provider. The idea that care homes charge more to individuals where they see more wealth is cynical in the extreme.

At least this way the better-off would still self-fund but to a set fee applicable to all, so their assets would last longer- benefitting the state and potentially allowing for legacies to family rather than paying for care home owner's annual Range Rover upgrades.

Really hope I die before I need care, my house is worth jack shit and the thought of being in a home fills me with horror. Sometimes the point of life eludes me

I don't object to paying care home fees and I am likely losing my inheritance as my mum as dementia, what I do object to is private payers subsidising the local authority beds, I have worked in this industry so know a home can be legitimately charging a private resident say £2k a week and in the exact same home with the exact same service the local authority are paying £1k a week for the council funded residents. That's not fair.

I look at it this way: I pay an absolute fortune in taxes each years. Thousands in income tax, road tax, property tax, carbon tax on my electricity and petrol. In the UK we pay absolutely extortionate levels of tax. And THEN there's the 20% VAT on almost everything. Meanwhile, I have no children in school, the roads are full of potholes and I haven't been able to see an actual physician at my local surgery since 2019. So "the government" can bloody well pay for my care when I am old - because it is my money for which I have gotten very little out of in services or benefits for decades.

Other way round. Dementia care is funded as its a medical disease that causes dependency, needing care cos you're frail/elderly isn't a disease so not funded

I know we will have to pay for care of/when the time comes even though we are modest working class people who worked hard and made sacrifices to buy a modest house while others had fun when young and don't have this asset to use to pay for care. Fair enough, that's the way the cookie crumbles, though I will be sad if there is nothing at all left for DD and family who inevitably made those sacrifices with us and couldn't have expensive holidays and some of the things her friends had when she was a child.
The other issue I do have is why oh why do private payers pay more for the same home than local authority funded payers? Tax payers help provide for those who can't work all their working lives ...fair enough ...but why should the elderly, in the last stages of their lives ves, not only pay for themselves but also supplement the local council in providing for those who can't pay. You really couldn't make it up ...I thought someone was joking with me when they said that DMIL's care would be more expensive than the person's in the next room because she was paying for herself 🤔

Hmmm.... I'm wondering, what is the threshold of putting someone in a carehome? What I mean is, I come from a country where we usually look after our elderly parents 'till the end' and the elderly go to a carehome only if they have no family left to look after them. Usually kids move the elderly mom/dad to their home and hire a nurse to come over if help is needed. I have a granny who is 85 and lives in a small house attached to their kids' house - it's very common. I was somewhat surprised to see so many carehomes when I moved to the UK. But after 15 years spent in this country and also having read many threads here, I see that the family ties tend not to be that strong here and putting the elderly in a carehome seems to be more of a cultural thing.

What if you piss your children off? Can they make you homeless?