Oct 6th, 2017

What do 38 Degrees members think about social care?

By 38 Degrees team

People with dementia are facing massive bills of tens of thousands of pounds to pay for the care they need. Having worked hard and paid taxes for decades, nobody should be forced to lose their home and savings to pay for essential care.

How we organise and pay for the care we may all need in later life has become the centre of a big political debate.

But right now the voice of the public (that’s us!) is missing. The way we organise and pay for social care determines the support we’ll get to grow older with dignity and stay independent for longer. So it’s vital that we have our say on how we make the system better and fairer.

So 95,000 38 Degrees members got involved and shared their thoughts on the best way to fix the social care crisis. Here are the results:

At the 2015 and 2017 General Elections, each major political party put forward ideas to make funding and paying for social care fairer. Which of the ideas listed below you would support?

Introduce a £72,000 cap on the amount of money anyone has to pay for their social care.

This means no matter how much money or assets someone has, once they’ve paid £72,000 the government pays for the rest of their care.
  

Everyone pays into a compulsory insurance scheme.

This means everyone puts a small amount of their pay in an insurance scheme that covers some of the cost of care they need as they grow older or live with a long-term condition.  

Change the rules so that anyone with less than £100,000 in income, pensions, savings or property gets help from the government to pay for their care.

This means people with more than £100,000 would have to pay for all their care until they have £100,000 in assets left, then the government takes over paying for their care.