The issues surrounding the "dementia tax" are a bit complex, but let me summate.
BEFORE:
If you stay at home when you get a long term illness that requires care, such as dementia, the state will cover the cost of your carer.
If you go into a home, the state takes a look at all your assets except your home. You, the ill person, pay until your wealth is diminished to about 25k. Then the state takes over the cost of your care. However, you will probably have to flog your home off anyway, or get your kids to pay for you, because only your care is covered. Your room and board is not - and that can get very pricey, so most old people equate going into care as being forced to flog their home.
This situation sucks for those in care in homes.
AFTER:
The Tory social care policy is that everyone needing care will have an assessment done on the total value of all their wealth, including their property. You will then buy an insurance policy from a private insurer, which draws equity from your home to pay for your care. You pay until either you have paid an as-yet-to-be-determined cap, or your net wealth drops to 100k.
Good news:
1. If you're in a care home, you are probably going to have more of your wealth left over when you pass on, as the wealth floor is 100k now, not 23k. Except there are no changes to the non-care costs, so you are still going to have to flog your home to pay for them or rely on your kids if you run out of liquid wealth.
Bad news
1. For all non-care-home people receiving care, they are now forced to pay towards that...
2. ... by buying insurance policies from Axa or someone, which contract you to selling off the family home no-matter what as soon as you die...
3. ... without any details of how much the insurer themselves will charge you for this service, which is a non-care cost and therefore is not protected...
4. ... specifically punishing those who take a long time to die.
Basically, if you *need* to be in a care home, the old system was unfair. The new system is still just as unfair. If you don't need to be in a care home, the old system was somewhat generous. Now it's as unfair as going into a care home.
If you get an illness requiring care and you cannot pay for it, you are now forced to sign away your family's home, which is possibly where your children grew up, to private insurance firms. The longer you live once you do this, the less money your children will get, unless the Tories decide, after an election where they are about to get a landslide, to make sure that their cap they were u-turned into AND the floor are rigid and cast-iron guaranteed for all your care and external costs. And the Tories won't do that, because they know full well that the private insurers could then charge whatever they like to the government for the care insurance.
This is, in short:
1. A policy designed to punish those who live for a long time in care...
2. A policy designed to punish the loved ones of those punished by (1)...
3. That does not solve the fundamental problems with the rickety and failing care system in this country, especially as there is no costings for anything the Tories want to do - they are making it up as they go along...
4. ... that enriches insurance companies...
5. ... that grabs at one block of money the government has largely left alone for the boomer generation to enjoy, their homes, that they bought in a generation where home ownership was HEAVILY encouraged...
6. ... which represents an attack on one of the last large large blocks of cash held by the people of this country, not by companies and billionaires...
7. ... because the Tories want to cut lots of taxes for the same companies that benefit from this policy.
At the SAME TIME AS THIS, we are leaving the EU, which is going to drive costs up across the board and endanger many of the people working in the care services, and hit those care service employees who are HORRIBLY paid with inflation.
To describe this policy as a calamity is an understatement.
It is one of the worst ideas I've ever seen in a manifesto.
And that's the REVISED version.
If you want a good example of what the Tories actually look like, unfettered from the need to convince voters or coalition partners, this is it. This turns my stomach each time I read it. It is an evil, evil policy.
And you'd better believe that this is only the beginning. If this is allowed to go off, this exact policy can be copied and pasted across the health and care sectors. You can bet Jeremy Hunt is salivating at the idea of getting all those long-term patients in NHS care to sign up to these policies too.
And you get all of that by letting May win - by saying "oh well, she's going to win anyway and she's better than Corbyn. Someone has to negotiate Brexit and defeat IS!"
