Sunday, February 28, 2010

The £8000 Tory Elderly Care Scheme

“People can for £8,000 or thereabouts as a single premium at retirement meet the future costs of their residential care .”
Andrew Lansley, Shadow Health Secretary, BBC Today, 12 February 2010

Under their plans, anyone opting to pay £8,000 upfront when they reach retirement age would in exchange be guaranteed free residential care, if they need it later.

The Conservatives say the scheme would pay for itself and require no public cash, no matter how many, or how few, people take it up.

They’ve worked it out like this: on average, one in five people needs residential care costing £25,000 annually for a two-year period at the end of their lives.

According to the Tories, five people need to pay into the scheme to cover the cost of one person claiming on it.

It sounds simple in theory – but unfortunately experts we spoke to thought it just wouldn’t work in practice.

First, there’s the problem of take-up. For the sums to add up, and to get the economies of scale, you need a lot of people to pay the optional £8,000. For example, more women than men end up needing residential care, so if too few men paid into the scheme, that could leave a funding black hole.

But as we found earlier this week, if insurance of this kind is voluntary not compulsory, many people don’t bother taking it out.
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But Would You Trust This......... Remember The Last Time The Tories Encouraged
A "Get Rich Quick" Insurance Scheme..... Well Endowment Mortgages......
YES.... Mis-Sold Many and their mates got fat on it and very wealthy

And Will They Pay Out..... Well they will find a way of NOT to.....
Mr Cameron is only 2 point ahead if Mr Brown as I write this.......let us hope now that the next Government is Hung.....so the parties have to work together in a common
consensus and get rid of stupid NHS schemes, Data Collection and get realistic.