Indeed you can’t get into an aged care facility unless you are assessed as needing that higher level of care.
There is of course also a shortage of workers delivering in-home support services and, for many older people, remaining at home for as long as it is feasible, with support, is preferable to going into an ACF.
Any prediction about “2050” is inherently dodgy. So much can change.
To fix this problem many things need to change. Obviously more and better carers are required for both home and institutional care, which means more wages and more training. Better systems, standards and supervision are required. We are all horrified when stories about the helpless elderly being mistreated are all too common. We are starting to understand that to prevent that will cost much more money.
I suspect too many people do not join the dots and work out that the hump on the age profile of the population is just starting to have obvious consequences in the age care costs. The number of citizens over 70 is going to keep rising for quite some time. The proportion of citizens needing care (who often pay little or no tax) compared with those paying taxes will keep rising. If we expect the government alone to come up with the billions, over a period of many years, to do all that is necessary there will be consequences for the national budget.
When the NDIS came in we said it was about time and most did not begrudge the cost. If aged care gets a similar boost it is likely to be popular. But who will pay?
It seems to me that everybody needs to make better provision for their retirement and allow for the possibility that they will need care on top of enough to live on. I see superannuation and government payments together solving this problem if it is to be solved. Some compromise between user pays and society pays needs to be worked out otherwise the financial burden on the young will be too much.
This is another reason to reserve super for retirement and squash schemes to use it for housing. As it is such schemes produce a huge loss to the individual in retirement funds and an overheated property market does not need more money pumped into it. You can add to those problems that people with inadequate super are likely to get second class care if taxation cannot cover it.
That depends on one’s political ideologies and priorities. If one’s objective is to look good with a balanced budget or as close as one can get, and to preserve and enhance peoples wealth by jacking up property prices, it is a goer. A local property valued at $188,000 in 1998 just sold for $1.6 million. The seller is 100% supportive of how the government enabled that.
For others it is an affront to society as well as terrible policy. But what is policy excepting in the run up to elections, often exposed sometime after 10PM on the night before the vote and long after the multiple rounds of ‘perks’ (aka bribes to voters) are rolled out?
…and allow the privileged and old to feast upon the underprivileged and the young.
We still need to be selective about which old.
There are many older Aussies around today who have never had the full benefit of life long super. Any measures of massive increases in the value of personal super need to be seen relative to inflation.
Retiring with as little as $100k in super would have sounded really great in 1991 when the SG was kicked off. The average price of a house in Sydney back then $180k near enough. Houses elsewhere much less.
Not all have the benefit of the increases in property values, depending on where and when one acquired the family home. The mirage of massive property wealth is a skewed system reporting property prices. Like for like comparisons are uncommon.
There are older Aussies on lower incomes who managed to acquire a home many years back. At best they may have been able to keep up basic maintenance. Is the home more than a museum of the best in 1950’s decor, masonite clad bathroom and kitchen included. Perhaps a recent 1980’s update?
Obviously I am generalising here. There are some young adults who have good incomes (or wealthy parents) who can hop right into the capital city property market and there are some people approaching or past retirement age who never managed to buy a house and reap the reward of the upward spiral.
We are digressing here. The main point was to change the broad expectation of what superannuation has to be able to cover and do away with the idea that ‘they’ (the gummint) can afford to pay for all.
More retirees trying to avoid going into aged care, exclusive data from Australian Seniors reveals.
No surprises there.
While looking at news on taxes increasing on the rich in line with Biden’s, IMF & OECD calls, it raised also the issue of the need to budget for the Aged Care funding increases necessary to properly fund that sector. There is some talk about a further levy on taxes to meet this need, somewhere between a 0.5% to 1% levy which would raise at the 0.5% about half the estimated needed funds and the 1% slightly over that target at $8 Billion. Perhaps time to adjust Medicare upwards by that 1% or even possibly better to do it at 2% instead and cover more Australians both aged and young with less reliance on Private Health cover.
Using the figures provided in the article the following examples help plot the extra cost of an increase:
At 1% on a weekly income of $480.77 ($25,000 per annum) the tax increase would be roughly $1.31 or at 2% roughly $2.62.
At the 1% rate on $961.54 per week ($50,000 per annum) the tax increase would be roughly $6.12 and at 2% roughly $12.24.
The levy at 1% would cost someone earning the average weekly earnings of $1280.30 ($66,575 per annum) an extra $665.75 a year. Cost per week at 1% roughly an increase of $12.83 or at 2% roughly $25.66.
If on the average full time weekly earnings of $1770.30 ($92,055.60 per annum) it will cost you an extra $707.87 a year. In weekly terms and at a 1% increase on tax of roughly $13.62 or at 2% an increase of $27.24. How much would that be a saving against Private Health insurance premiums?
Median Income (where 1/2 the population sit below or at) is about $88,000 per annum or about $1,692.31 per week.
The article discussing this has a chart showing the various impacts on a range of incomes:
Most people would easily spend more on their Coffees on their way to work per week (unless home made).
Another option though would be to increase the cost to those in aged care (while noting that those at the povvo end don’t pay anything anyway and that would continue to be the case).
Costs increase in line with CPI every year(?) but there could be a one-off jump.
I would like to see it scrapped and the levy incorporated in the income tax rates. That would be far more honest. The current arrangement is a bit like drip pricing. Drip pricing is illegal - and so should a random mix of your main tax rate, plus a levy here and a levy there.
A more adventurous option would be to introduce something like super but for aged care i.e. you are forced to save towards the cost of your aged care.
Part of the reason the Levy was not incorporated into Tax was that it was seen to be a measure that made people easily aware of how much they paid into the Medicare system for their healthcare. Another of the reasons was that it is also possibly levied on a number of potential income streams that are non taxable and only declared at the end of tax year when a return is submitted. A further reason is that it was less complicated to apply the levy after all deductions were taken into account and the taxable income was ascertained, it is possible to have enough deductions and allowances ie Childrento push the taxable income under the point where the levy becomes payable.
For 2019/2020 the following thresholds applied
"Medicare levy low-income thresholds for singles, families and seniors and pensioners are increased (by CPI) for the 2019-20 year.
That might have made sense circa 30 years ago - and in any case I doubt that the Medicare Levy completely covers the cost of healthcare.
Some of the points that you raise are generic flaws in our tax system. They already happen i.e. your employer withholds income for the Medicare Levy because your employer has no idea about what other deductions you might have. However it all comes out in the wash when your tax is assessed.
Under my suggestion, the income threshold for the Medicare Levy would be aligned with an individual tax band. It’s not as if there is anything magic about any of the thresholds. This would allow the (former) Medicare Levy to be 0% below a certain income level.
Of course that would highlight how the government fails to index the bands i.e. bracket creep.
It already is if your income is below the weekly limit of $438, if you have dependants then a Medicare levy variation declaration is completed (if you know about it) if you think your income threshold will be increased enough by your dependants to vary the Medicare Levy you pay through Income Tax and then the employer needs to assess that using the Medicare levy adjustment weekly tax table. Of course this still doesn’t take into account other deductions or non taxable incomes.
Apparently, the market has failed. I’m shocked!
Orwell would be proud of the bit in parentheses.
I prefer to think this government seems proud of taking a serious requirement it seemingly had no interest in yet was forced to embrace, and spin it into maximising dollars in pockets as its focus. There seems little else but finger pointing, photo-ops and some grandstanding from time to time 
When the ideology of the day, reinforced by countless elections, is ‘We can always trust private enterprise to solve society’s problems’ especially when there are lots of carrots, dollars to be had, few sticks, and fewer real penaltie, we get what ‘we’ elect.
It is a convenient truth for a disinterested ideologically driven government that shutting down the dodgy operators would change substandard services to none for those so affected. The oversight is what it is since better providers would only step up if there were attractive dollars in play for ‘trust me’ services and they demand more than just profits; in the capitalistic private enterprise market the profits have to be large enough or they take their money elsewhere where the margins suit.
Is that what living on the margin is? /s
Run effectively and efficiently should a not for profit end each year with just one cent in the accounts?
IE Having delivered more and better, not less and worse.
That private enterprise can compete, suggests they are not on equal terms, or the not for profits are also not as they suggest.
For a decent, truly Democratic government, it would be reason to enter the market. To provide aged care as a public good (leading, probably to the for-profit private sector exiting the market).
In Victoria the state government is already providing aged care (about 10% of the total beds in Vic). All good. Don’t like any private providers, go with the state government.
It is a complex web of interlocking responsibilities between
The PM promised all workers in Aged Care would be vaccinated by Easter this year. Nearly 3 months on the percentage is supposedly just 1 in 3.
It’s something that with all the early vaccine delivers being Pfizer was readily achievable. The PM and Govt had earmarked the first 1.4million doses of vaccine to cover the 318,000 estimated workers in Aged Care and Disability Services.
It’s much more than just a failure in the vaccination rollout. It’s a failure of the government’s ‘duty of care’.
At the same time most of the private enterprises and organisations providing those services have remained silent. One does not need too think to hard about why or which dark place their heads were in all this time.
Beyond the Aged Care Royal Commission, one more mammoth failure of the industry and Federal Government to deliver the services our older Australians have worked hard for all their younger lives.
No amount of spin or excuses accepted. If they did not know this was happening they should have, and fixed it.
P.S
In the interests of transparency we do help to support our mum who is in her 90’s and in Aged Care. It’s a lived experience, one that too few Aussies get to see first hand.
It wasn’t a promise. It was a target. Some of the media and politicians are politicising the issue and don’t know the difference between targets and promises.
When a pollie misses his ‘targets’ he touts, it is his personal credibility. It is a fail regardless.
Paraphrasing even if imperfectly a Steve Jobs anecdotal story, if the janitor cannot clean a room because he does not have the keys he is forgiven. If a vice president fails to keep his business unit on track he is not doing his job and has no excuse since he has ‘the responsibility, powers and discretion’ to do so.
