Elderly Care is of concern to all who are, or about to retire and has been receiving increasing attention recently, but mainly of a negative nature on cost, increasing demand and existing failure.
The State solution is a retirement tax suggested at about £30,000 and taken from pension funds at retirement as an insurance premium against possible future care. The State says it cannot afford to fund the existing pensioners or projected demand.
Yet no one has applied commonsense or logical thought to the problem and analysed it, what are the needs and extent, what percentage of the retired and at what age? All straightforward questions needed to establish costs and how to deal with them.
Although there are a lot of reports there are little facts, real information or statistics available, except on a detailed specific and confusing basis.
The best found was a general report stating that a retiring person at age 65 had 10 years of healthy living, with 13 years before disability for the average life expectancy of 18 years. Does this mean one has an even chance of good health to 75 and in a wheelchair at 78, even though expected to work until 70!
What we need to know is at age 75 to 90 the proportion of us who will be alive and how many will be active, in need of social and luncheon clubs, home care, sheltered or residential housing or need intensive care. Information that is available but which just needs sorting and simply presenting.
The best and most cost effective way of meeting this and the staffing required can then be established and how to fairly reward carers and charities, who mainly carry this out. The present bodged and panic approach will not meet the present or future.
Well managed pension funds could meet a lot of the costs, however three quarters of the working population have no pension savings and could not raise £30,000 at retirement, and it unrealistic and unfair to expect the remainder to meet the cost.
The aging population is a major stumbling block, yet preliminary data from the 2011 Census, essential for economic planning, will not be available until July, 15 months after the event, with the bulk not until mid 2012. Imagine businesses working on that timescale
This is only the tip of the State bureaucratic iceberg; the Government decide on a 20% cut in spending but don’t analyse where these cuts can be afforded, resulting in chaos, u-turns and general hardship and discontent.
The Health Minister admits to angry nurses the loss of 4,000 jobs, yet we all know from experience that they are thin on the ground, as are the police, doctors, firemen etc.; there appears to be “too many chiefs and not enough Indians”. Yet the Defence minister announces savings of £35bn, how much more wasteful overspend is hidden in the woodwork; get real and sort it out properly.
I am sick to death of the blame game; it is all the fault of the previous Government, the Banks and now the Euro. We elect Ministers to run the Country not make excuses, the whole of Europe is fed up with austerity getting nowhere, with vested interests and the Commercial sector dictating terms and manipulating affairs, with Ministers cosying up.
The main problem is overspending abroad and getting us into the hands of the moneylenders, who set interest rates at their whim, of course internal imbalance is important, but much of it costs nothing in real terms, particularly labour, and can be controlled more effectively.
We need to tackle the whole question of the economy, the needs of the population and the effectiveness of budget cuts in a more professional manner to make ourselves independent of external control, that i s to run our own Country ourselves.
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