Government alters payment for care proposals

Nick_C

The two issues - value of savings and value of your home - are totally different and this is red herring thrown in by the opposition. The Government promised people would not have to sell their homes to pay for their care and they have kept that promise. The capital cut off for assistance with nursing home fees ahs always been there. Its a separate issue, and there was no promise to reform it.

Trebor16

Having just been looking at nursing homes, how many people can afford to pay as much as £50000 for their care? That was the rate that some of them were charging and the cheapest I saw was still £36000 a year.

I think that a normal residential care home is probably cheaper but many who go into homes need nursing care. Their savings are soon gobbled up in double quick time. If we are supposed to be a welfare state then why are some expected to contribute a hell of a lot more to their care just because they were financially prudent?

The trouble with this debate is that successive governments have sat on the fence for too long. Blair said in his speech to the 1997 Labour Party conference that he didn't want to live in a country where people had to sell their homes to pay for care, and then he and his government did nothing about it. In fact they presided over the scandal of NHS continuing care and sat back while the NHS abdicated their responsibilities and repeatedly used flawed assessments to wrongly say that people didn't have health needs.

Andrew Dilnot put forward proposals that were much fairer than what is proposed now by the current Government, but it seems as if it is the usual approach of the government towards the elderly, and not recognising what they have previously contributed (and in many cases still paying income tax) and seeing them merely as cash cows.

Savvy_Sue

seven-day-weekend wrote: »

Maybe it was Pension Credit? I'm pretty sure the State Pension doesn't stop or get reduced.

Definitely wasn't that, Dad wasn't entitled. I suppose it could have been an overpayment from after he died for the pension, and then there were effectively two overpayments for AA, one for the period after Dad had died, and another when they realised he'd been in hospital for six weeks before dying there. I know it all got very annoying, because I knew there was an overpayment, they said there wasn't, then decided there was ...

Anyway, back on topic, I'm not saying the govt has been entirely straightforward with this, but a) what do you expect from politicians, and b) does it really sound like a good idea to defer EVERYONE's payment until after death, at which point there will be a huge stink from the surviving heirs who 'didn't realise' that the house would be to be sold THEN to pay the care home, OR all the savings they were planning use to do said house up have to go to pay the care home fees.

Somehow, Somewhen, Somewhere, the bills have to be paid. I've said it before, if Mum needs care - residential or otherwise - I'm jolly glad she's got assets which can be used to pay for the best. She can't take them with her, after all.

downshifter98

Savvy_Sue wrote: »

Definitely wasn't that, Dad wasn't entitled. I suppose it could have been an overpayment from after he died for the pension, and then there were effectively two overpayments for AA, one for the period after Dad had died, and another when they realised he'd been in hospital for six weeks before dying there. I know it all got very annoying, because I knew there was an overpayment, they said there wasn't, then decided there was ...

Could it have been DLA - I know that is meant to stop after 28 days in hospital.

pollypenny

When my father was in hospital, in 2001, he had to give in his pension book. There was an over-payment, as he had been in for longer then 6 weeks.

He was not getting AA at that time.

seven-day-weekend

pollypenny wrote: »

When my father was in hospital, in 2001, he had to give in his pension book. There was an over-payment, as he had been in for longer then 6 weeks.

He was not getting AA at that time.

Just googled but lost it. Apparently since 2005you don't lose your Pension whilst in hospital.

so now we know, a rule change

Savvy_Sue

downshifter98 wrote: »

Could it have been DLA - I know that is meant to stop after 28 days in hospital.

No, he definitely didn't get that.

I'm going to go with a memory failure on my part when I first posted: the .gov.uk website does say you must tell the pension service if you go into hospital, so mum did. AA definitely stops after a while, and despite Mum writing to DWP they failed to stop it. I think we ended up with 3 overpayments: one for Dad's pension being paid post mortem for a few days more than he was entitled to; one for his AA ditto; and one for them failing to stop his AA once he'd been in hospital for a while. That was the amount they initially said we did NOT owe them, when I knew we did, and eventually they demanded it back.

Anyway, that's all a bit OT ... and we have a rule change!