As things stand, anyone who gets terminal cancer or heart disease can get long-term free care through the National Health Service — Britain’s chronically underfunded government-run universal health-care system — because they can stay in the hospital. However, the NHS bolts when it comes to chronic mental conditions that don’t require hospitilization. To get help for those, the elderly have to turn to their local councils (municipal governments). However, these councils depend on London’s central government for funding, and that body has been cutting back (partially to offset NHS’s ever-ballooning costs). So they refuse to pay for in-home care of the old and senile if these seniors have anything over $30,000 in savings, not counting their homes.
This leaves many older Britons, some dealing with serious conditions such as Alzheimer’s, in the lurch, a problem that will only get worse as Britain’s population ages. (In the next 16 years, the country’s 65-plus senior population is expected to grow by 40 percent.) May’s Tory predecessor, David Cameron, had pledged to cap the lifelong out-of-pocket long-term care costs of such elderly at around $93,000 by 2020.
But it’s fiscally unsustainable for the government to pick up the remaining tab. So May initially proposed to scrap that cap. However, she was forced to beat a quick retreat after a maelstrom of protest that threatened to plunge her party into crisis ahead of special elections she herself called on June 8. Still, she hasn’t withdrawn the other part of her proposal, namely, to let seniors keep up to $128,000 of their savings before state assistance kicks in — up from $30,000. That sounds good, right? The catch is that their home values will now be counted in those savings.
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