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

[TourdeCrema]

So Andy Burnham is looking at a 10% death tax across the board instead of the system we now have, where social care may wipe out your entire inheritance and you don’t get a penny.

paying for everyone’s social care through the death tax

so if you leave £350k house and your parent had 5 years of care, you sell the house and pay £35k to the government and keep the remaining £315k.
presently you’d walk away with £0 as the social care would take the house cost

i think this is a much more reasonable suggestion, than walking away without a penny if my parent needed care( both my parents are dead, so it won’t affect me now)

fewer people have been in receipt of funded care, although more should be eligible... That shows care is being rationed already without expanding the definition of who qualifies and with what conditions.

Even Medical Care is already being hugely rationed in the NHS as well. Despite us spending a full 11.4% of our GDP on it: 21% of total taxation.

To the point that anyone who either has medical insurance through work or the means to self-fund does that instead.

We're in the worst of all worlds: where we pay huge amounts of the money we earn (through taxes) for a service we often can't use, because it's rationed through forcing people to wait years in pain. Or rationed by keeping seriously ill people in corridors with minimal care, or waiting hours for an ambulance, or moaning over their drip in A&E (our A&E was like a war zone the last time I was unfortunate enough to go. I waited 7 hours, but even the guy moaning in pain with his drip - and throwing up every so often - was sitting there more than an hour. He did at least get a hard plastic seat - lots of people were sitting on the floor).

But because it's supposed to care for everyone, there's no government-backed, universally available (non-underwritten) insurance, like other countries have. And no alternative at all for critical or emergency care.

It's a shit show. Why on earth would we support creating a Care Service in the same model?!?

We'll end up paying loads more tax... and still not have access to decent, universally available care in our old age. Still end up paying for it entirely ourselves out of pocket. Like we do - if we can - with healthcare now.

Now we do, yes. Today's older pensioners did not work (a lot of women) and did not have the easy access to private pensions or compulsory workplace pensions.
Anyone in the workplace now has no excuse but you can't judge people aged 75+ by today's standards and opportunities.

Thank you. As one of the over 75s I agree. Many of us did work with young children, but it was often just bits and pieces of jobs that could be fitted round our husband’s working hours. Childcare, unless one had willing family nearby, was almost non existent. Maternity leave? What was that! Women were still expected to leave some public sector jobs on marriage. The first good, permanent job i had after having children was part time. I couldn’t join the pension scheme unless I was full time.

We were of a generation where most of our mums were housewives, and unless we were middle class professionals, weren’t expected to have careers. Our lives really can’t be compared too closely to following generations.

Someone 75 was in their 30s when private pensions were rolled out in the mid 80s so had 30ish years of working life left during which they could have saved into their own pensions or joined their employers scheme. Neither myself nor sister were employed by a big firm so no employer pension scheme to join, but we both set up our own private pensions in the late 80s as there were adverts everywhere for them, lots of media coverage re their introduction etc. If I remember rightly, minimum was something small like £20 per month- we indexed it to increase yearly and then let compound growth do its thing and now both have decent pension pots now were in our 60s!

Likewise @Badbadbunny ! I did have an employer pension fund when I worked in London and NY, but one I cashed in to put a deposit on my one bed flat and the other company went into receivership and the people who wound it up bought an insurance based pension for the fund members, which now pays me £300 per month. It wouldn't be enough to live on but it's a welcome top up.

Personal finance - your pensions, savings, investments - is one aspect, and hugely important. I didn't mean to minimise the opportunities my generation (I'm 60) had with more DB and DC pension schemes, more childcare options (none of them cheap, however!) during working lives have had to build up a better-resourced retirement than my mother's generation. The state pension has improved, auto-enrolment has brought more people into pension saving, attendance allowance, pension credit, support on heating bills, free prescriptions and travel - there have been a lot of initiatives to improve the lot of pensioners and although I'd have to check the IFS numbers, I believe the rate of pensioner poverty now runs well below the rate of working age poverty.

But the other aspect of planning is a willingness to engage realistically and try to get ahead of the aging trajectory, rather than being ambushed by perfectly predictable evolutions of your physical needs. I'm probably pretty raw about this, having watched my parents (89 and 95, dad now in a nursing home) bring a toxic blend of passivity and stubbornness to the issue, and essentially engineering a circumstance where my brother and I became responsible for ensuring that he had somewhere safe, welcoming and decent to lay his head. His need for care, and their need for a serious readjustment in how they lived, and proper engagement with social services, had been signalled for years by his numerous falls. His increasingly dangerous driving! But because by some stroke of dumb luck he didn't break anything or sustain any worse injuries than bruises and cuts, (or kill anyone on the road) my parents refused to take heed. Until the day came that he could no longer get himself back up again, and was doubly incontinent, and struggled with daily living tasks so that my mum had to dress him, wash him, bring every bite of food to him and look on helplessly when he fell over, yet again, unable to help him up. I don't suppose any amount of policy reform, no matter how good, can change people's behaviour on such sensitive matters as aging, dependency, the viability of a long marriage in the face of physical frailty and money.

It is also true that the system is difficult to navigate, that at least some local authorities will try to push home care packages on people that have outlived such solutions being suitable for them, in order to ration access to residential care, and that my parents would have needed our help not to be pushed into a sub-standard home (and I mean literally, a home that had been deemed 'unsatisfactory' by the CQC, closed down, and reopened under new management less than 12 months later, but with no CQC inspection or rating. But at £1050 per week, was the cheapest option available, and the council social services team wanted to push my dad into it. We dug our heels in, insisted on finding a better home that would accept a third-party top up payment agreement, and he is very well-looked after in a home that costs around £1650 a week, plus extras for things like haircuts, chiropody and some, not all, outings.)

I really hope that everyone contributing to threads like this also contacts the Casey Commission, and their MP. And that when proposals for a bit more income tax across the board, or a bit extra on all estates, not just a sub-category of bigger estates and higher earners, are laid out in order to better resource the system so that those needing services get better ones, and those that need full-blown residential care can have their costs capped, so not every bloody penny gets wiped out, and an insurance market can come into being, the sodding opposition parties and their respective newspapers won't scream 'death taxes', 'fleecing the rich to pay for the feckless' and that a government actually gets a chance to do something sensible to meet the problems of the next 50 years!

I shall be in touch with the Casey Commission. And while I shall lose out if income or inheritance taxes increase to fund the costs, actually I think it is important that our senior citizens are looked after kindly, fed well and kept clean. I am, I think, 15 or 20 years from needing to be cared for by strangers, and I'd rather take my own life than be passed around from pillar to post.

Actually, my dad’s care costs more like £1900 per week, but a portion of that is paid directly to the home out of the NHS pot, as he was assessed, within two weeks of being admitted into the care home, as requiring nursing care. The local authority assessment panel only assessed him as needing residential care, which further restricted the homes they were willing to consider. Before I engaged with this system, I thought social services and social workers were advocates for the person needing the service. I feel that was very naive!

ending my life on my terms is also a feature in my planning @Papyrophile! But I think we ought to have a fair crack at improving the system as well!