When I awoke yesterday morning, it was to the pleasant surprise that we had some rain during the night. It is always difficult to assess exactly how much rain we had actually received but the paving slabs were wet and thee were some light rain clouds scudding across the sky. On getting up, I reminded myself to change the cold water in which the prepared potatoes had been sitting all night to reduce their starch content. Opinion seems to be divided as to whether this reduces the huge starch content by very much but I thought I would have just a few cubes of potato par-boiled and then finished off with a little oil together with an equal quantity of onion. I hear from the news this morning that after one week in office, Andy Burnham, is due to unveil his plans for a National Care Service. This decision has been put off by successive governments for literally decades. The most authoritative report on this subject – the Dilnot report was published 15 years ago but all govenments have baulked at the cost. There is a rising recognition that some of the costs of particularly residential care should be borne by people themselves but at a capped limit to ensure that the vast proportion of the value locked within a house should not be used for social care deployed on the elderly person. In the past, a Tory government suggested a cap of \u00a375,000 but the trouble about a figure like this is that it might represent one third of the total value of a house in poorer pats of the community\/country but be just a pin prick in prosperous parts of the country where house prices are so much higher. Taking a proportion of assets, such as a house, may sound to be the solution but this fails the test of fairness were individuals and families are charged different costs for the same service. I will be interesting to see what solution will be forthcoming to square this particular circle but in any event one can be assured that the middle classes who may be asked to pay more will shout the loudest in protest. Now the chairman of ICI used to say ‘Do not bring me problems, bring me solutions’ so, in this spirit, I will put forward my own suggestions for the funding of social care. I start off with two axioms. The first of these is that we can all expect to live to old age, and perhaps even extreme old age, and probably in excess of the age at which parents died (on average) So if we are used to paying for pensions in our old age, why should we not make provision for or own old age as well. German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck introduced the world’s first state pension system in 1889, targeting workers aged 70 and older to curb socialism and ease industrial poverty which was nearly 140 years ago and the Germans fund old age with extra payments from those middle aged and older. My second axiom is that we can afford anything if we start saving soon enough and for long enough periods of time. So my proposition is as follows: that we charge almost everybody in the society with a compulsory level of \u00a32,000 a year (about \u00a3167 a month) To put this amount into context, the average cost of keeping one medium sized Cocker Spaniel is approximately \u00a346 per month in vet plan and insurance (the vet plan covers flea and worming treatment, plus vaccinations) and food costs of around \u00a340 a month so this amounts to over \u00a31,000 a year i.e. half the cost of a social care levy. I would levy the \u00a32,000 on practically the whole population, even if in receipt of benefits by reducing the amount of benefit payable and the population would pay this from the age of 35 until they were 70 i.e. just past retirement age and so, in round terms, this would build up an individual social care ‘pot’ of \u00a3100,000 in round terms. Now let us assume that average residential care costs are of the order of \u00a365k a year, then the accumulated ‘pot’ can be run down at the rate of \u00a320k a year which, with the average pension of \u00a310k a year means that \u00a330k of the \u00a365k annual cost will be paid for by the individual with the government providing the other half. Any house or capital that the individual has built up for themselves will be retained so there is no question of having to sell one’s house to pay for care fees (as has happened four times in the case of my immediate family, as it happens) I think that most of the population would regard it as ‘fair’ that they have to contribute to the cost of their own old age social care provided that the government was seen as doing ‘its bit’ and that retained the house that one has paid for during all one’s life. Of course, one can play around and model somewhat different scenarios with these figures – for example, could take the average length of stay in a residential home at being 2.5 years in which case the contribution from the ‘saved’ pot would be \u00a340k and with \u00a310 of pension, this \u00a350k per year would then be 75% of the total cost. Now won’t it be interesting to see what kind of scheme the government comes up in the next few days but I reckon that it will not be as simple or as comprehensive as the scheme I have outlined above.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
After the church service was over. I chatted with some fellow parishioners and was saddened to learn of the death of a parisoner with whom I had served alongside on the Church Parochial council for a time. He seems to have had a series of episodes of treatment in hospital followed by a rapid discharge and then an altogether not unexpected readmission. I was saddened to learn that his final weeks might have been anything but peaceful. After I had washed the car and bought a Sunday newspaper, I came home and watched again an episode of the ‘Pilgrimage’ series, this time focusing on a journey through some of the Celtic sites of North Wales and although I had seen it before, it is always quite interesting to see the voyages of self discovery. I cooked mself a small meal of chicken and some stir fry as in the late afternoon I am due to accompany my American friend for a ‘leaving do’ for one of the Methodist circuit ministers whom we both happen to like and to know quite well.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
When I awoke yesterday morning, it was to the pleasant surprise that we had some rain during the night. It is always difficult to assess exactly how much rain we had actually received but the paving slabs were wet and thee were some light rain clouds scudding across the sky. On getting up, I reminded […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8444","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8444","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8444"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8444\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8445,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8444\/revisions\/8445"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8444"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8444"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8444"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}