New hope amid the care crisis
WITH Government’s handling of the Covid crisis lurching from hopeless to hapless, they need to seize on any idea that could benefit us.
With delicious irony, one possible get-out-of-jail card has been handed to them by the man who fought to stop Boris Johnson becoming Prime Minister – former Tory leadership challenger Jeremy Hunt.
Having faced an unfair campaign of hatred while Health Secretary, Mr Hunt has emerged as one of the smartest people not on the front benches.
He now heads up the Health and Social Care Committee and last week proposed a radical plan that could help tackle the care crisis – something the PM promised to do during this parliament.
Crucially, this comes from a crossparty committee, so before it even reaches the House of Commons it can draw on support from all sides.
Currently, anyone with assets of more than £14,250 must pay for their own social care and the charity Age UK reports that 1.4million older folk are not getting the support they need. That number has risen by 19% in the last two years. This, along with other measures, has resulted in about 21,000 people being forced to sell their homes each year to pay for care.
In some parts of the country fees of about £50,000 per year are common.
Specialist care, such as that for people with dementia, can push the costs towards £80,000 a year. This is what makes the headline feature of the proposal so eye-catching – that the fees paid by an individual would be capped at £46,000 and after that it would fall to the state.
That is still a sizeable amount of money but it is immeasurably fairer than what we have now. It means that people with conditions like dementia would be treated in the same way as those with long-term illnesses such as cancer.
This, of course, comes at a cost. The report says
£7billion is needed to avoid the system collapsing in the face of the pandemic, while implementing these proposals adds
£3.1bn by 2023-24.
I’d argue we cannot afford not to do it. In 1945, the Labour administration of Clement Attlee set up the NHS. Attlee is now hailed as a hero. Could Mr Johnson manage the same by creating the National Care Service?