£670m = £22 per UK worker. If they stuck that on the income tax who would even notice?

woodscolt: Its not just £22 per worker – its ANOTHER £22 per worker on top of the hundreds if not thousands already loaded onto the poor bloody workers.

At some point the last straw breaks the camels back …..

And anyway, I agree with the state providing care for the infirm elderly – but NOT child care.

Having children is a lifestyle choice – getting old and infirm is not.

You want children – fine. But don’t expect me to pay for your kids.

‘Free care sounds nice, but why redistribute to the rich?’

Ms Toynbee’s headline makes absolutely no sense. Moving from a tax-funded system based on the ability to pay redistributes to the rich as it relieves them of the burden of subsidising those on lower incomes now forced to pay ‘user-charges’. Remove that principle and you negate the idea of any form of tax-funded healthcare for all but the very poorest.

One look across the Atlantic shows that such a system is not just inequitable, but also less efficient and much more expensive. Means-testing will also pile on unnecessary administrative costs and introduce disincentives for those on low incomes to save or enter the housing market.

It is not ‘redistributing to the rich’ to pay for the care of the wealthy – they put the bulk of the money in!

The cost of social care has to be borne by society as a whole (unless some form of mass euthanasia is assumed). ‘Saving’ the taxpayer £870m, doesn’t save society £870m – it simply transfers it to individuals, with only a crude reference to ability to pay. How is it that I, as a taxpayer, cannot afford to pay for social care, but can afford it from my post-tax income?

It makes no sense for individuals to store up enough in savings to pay for high dependency long-term care when only 1:6 will require it. State funded care is cheaper, more equitable and, in pooling risk across the whole population, more economically efficient.

Cutting back tax-funded care redistributes to the rich.

Its not just £22 per worker – its ANOTHER £22 per worker on top of the hundreds if not thousands already loaded onto the poor bloody workers.

Except that quite a few of those people will save by not having to pay for care for themselves or their elderly parents. And the tax burden in the UK is really not that high, especially for higher earners.

Don Paskini: “We spend billions on helping people to understand the vastly complex systems that we’ve put in place, and still people die because they can’t get the help they are entitled to. Public money which is meant to help unemployed people get jobs instead helps a small number of people live in mansions.”

Agreed on the first sentence; people die on our streets, tucked away in the corner of a bus shelter at midnight to escape the weather and slowly dying. Without an example, I don’t understand the second sentence. Wealthy unemployed people can and should claim benefits (adjusted according to disposable assets) just the same as anyone else; if we get around to a Citizen’s Basic Income, they’d be entitled to it too; how do I claim the Mansion Allowance?

“At the moment, the middle class gets taxed once to pay for a whole range of services and payments which they don’t benefit from, and then has to pay astronomical costs for care for their loved ones.”

My mum pays for her care. A few years ago, it came from savings and now it is effectively a debenture on her home. When she dies, it is unlikely that there will be any cash left and that the state will have chipped in a few pounds for her care. My mum’s rainy day arrived and fortunately she had enough money to make choices that will work for her in the long run. She is unlikely to be transferred to a different care home when the money runs out. It’s the old folks without personal money that I worry about.

“Just as the NHS makes sure that everyone contributes through the tax system and gets free healthcare when they need it, so elderly people should receive high quality social care provided by well trained care workers earning a decent wage, and parents should be able to get the childcare they need to be able to go and work.”

Ill health, agedness and disability are largely unavoidable. Reproduction is a choice. Those who choose should acknowledge it. If it is not economically efficient to pay for child care (ie the carer earns more or less the same as the worker), acknowledging long term productivity, a state benefit is useless.

Woodscolt: “Except that quite a few of those people will save by not having to pay for care for themselves or their elderly parents. And the tax burden in the UK is really not that high, especially for higher earners”.

Lets see, 20% tax off the top plus NI.. ( I dont get as far as high rate tax). Then whatever I spend except food another 17.5% additional tax comes off plus on occasions excise duty on fuel and VAT added on the excise duty.

Better than 50% of my gross disappears in government tax of some form or other, then the council levy their tax, plus the police add-on. Tax on insurance premiums, tax on domestic fuels, tax on my TV and shortly extra on my phone to pay for broadband …….. Tax on flying on holiday,,,,,, I could go on for hours.

Its all one giant taxing machine to pay for God knows what.

Presumably, by the same logic, the NHS, schools, child benefit, free bus passes and every other popular and effective public service which reduces inequality should be changed so they are free only for the poorest, with everyone else having to pay.

I remember reading somewhere that one council has already announced the closure of its battered women’s refuge on the grounds that it discriminates against men under the Harman rules.

There was another gross logical error in that piece. Devolution means that we have social experiments as different places do things differently.

OK.

The we get, but local councils do things differently therefore we need a National Care Service.

Eh?

Do we want experimentation into different methods or not?

How can Polly discuss this topic without providing some guidance on pragmatic questions such as how much means testing would save (by not giving free services to the better off) how much means testing would cost (administrative) and how means testing would distort behavior (complexity plus acting like a marginal tax when benefits withdrawn). Whatever you think about questions of “fairness” and desirability of means testing, you can’t form a judgment without having some idea of the answers to these questions.

While Polly Toynbee is often wrong she is right on this one. The Bill she is referring to is garbage – it is a quick fix and will only address a tiny part of the social care crisis which Labour have helped to ferment. Why should you get free care if you happen to fall into one category but no help if you fall into a different one? That isn’t equality – it is a political trick in the run up to an election.

@9 Luis Enrique: “How can Polly discuss this topic without providing some guidance on pragmatic questions such as how much means testing would save…”

Luis asks some fair questions. If the state attempts to increase the number of means tested benefits, how does it spread the pain of change? Some people will lose benefits on which they fairly rely and because the state is not all knowing, there will be incidental casualties. Of course, we could add an extra layer of bureaucracy to provide a transition. In that new layer, people who were not intended to benefit may be able to claim…

Who is going to do this administration? I’ve always regarded PAYE as a fair exchange between employers and the Inland Revenue; if it is going to become more complicated, HMRC should be doing the lot, in fairness to the recipients of tax benefits. How much will that cost?

In my reading the expression “Simplicate and add lightness” has been ascribed to William Bushnell Stout and Colin Chapman. Repeat it to yourself.

The difference between health and social care is grey and is often arbitrary
That is why the government is proposing to ensure that re enablement is available free of charge and become the default option for entry to the system. Effective re enablement will reduce the need for future health and social care interventions. Is PT suggesting that the very rich people should pay for NHS funded care in nursing homes? Why not means test the NHS ?

5
If your mother received nursing care before 2001, she would also have paid, at private rates, for that nursing care, although interventions from a registered nurse were part of the ‘free at the point of delivery’ ethos of the NHS. In fact it wasn’t just middle-class people who had to pay for their own care – thousands of people who struggled to buy their council house subseqently had to sell to pay for nursing home care. When Social Services became aware that people requiring some form of care owned their own homes, their first response was to place them in residential care rather than attempt to provide a care-package within their own homes, protecting local budgets but in contravention of the spirit of the Community Care Act. Now those with the wealth can afford to seek legal and financial advice in order to prevent this from happening, not something that is accesible to working-class people who happened to buy their council house.
I don’t know what the current situation is with regard to the number of older people being placed in residential care when care in the community, in its’ literal sense, would be a viable option, but research shows that it is older people who generally do not take-up means-tested benefits For example, a third of pensioner households who are entitled to pension credits do not apply, between 30 and 40 per cent do not claim housing and council tax benefits. This group belongs to the poorest in the country as all of these benefits are means-tested.
Who would lose from extending means-testing, this is’ difficult to say, initially the
middle-class springs to mind, but judging by how they have been able to protect their own financial interests it probably is not so. Taking the example of poorer pensioners not claiming existing means-tested benefits I would guess that it would be the same group. They too have paid tax throughout their lives, maybe not as much income tax as the middle-class but VAT, and numerous other duties are the same for all.

Having just paid my taxes for 2008/9 I agree it can hurt. However, those rugged individualists out there must ask themselves what services provided by government at every level they would be prepared to give up to reduce their tax bills. Refuse collection? Healthcare? They all need to be provided, and don’t be fooled that private healthcare is as good as the NHS. They drop you like a hot potato if you’re really ill!

Successive national governments have handed huge amounts of public money to private hands, often secretively and wastefully. PFI is a good example of this. It pisses me off and I want it to be part of a national debate, not this fatuous why-should-I pay-for-someone-else nonsense. As usual a silly bit of electioneering takes everyone’s attention and stops US from setting the political agenda.