Aged care funding and the next great health crisis of dementia need to be addressed now, writes Martin Laverty.
When observing the contentious back and forth that takes place within the halls of power in federal parliament, one could be forgiven for thinking the government and the opposition don’t agree on any issue. One area in which bipartisan support is emerging, however, is the need to improve access to aged care for older Australians living in poverty.
Around Australia, we have just marked Anti-Poverty Week, an important chance to focus on some of the people who are most in need in our society. People often have an image of what poverty “looks like” and the people who are affected by poverty. I suspect that image is rarely of people in retirement, but there are tens of thousands of older Australians who are struggling financially.
Catholic Health Australia (CHA) represents the nation’s largest network of residential and community aged care providers and our Catholic ethos underscores the notion that a society’s commitment to justice and compassion should be judged by how it treats the most vulnerable citizens. When it comes to aged care, that group is those older Australians who don’t have the means to pay for care or accommodation in their later years of life.
As part of efforts to reform the aged care sector, the Productivity Commission has made recommendations that will deliver better access and choice in aged care to those not able to meet costs of care. We enthusiastically endorse those recommendations and it appears both the Government and Opposition are working steadily towards implementing elements of these recommendations, which in the years ahead will greatly improve the lives of financially disadvantaged older Australians.
Among the recommendations made by the Commission are plans to make consumer contributions better reflect people’s capacity to pay, and for aged care service providers to make a proportion of their accommodation available to residents who are deemed to be financially disadvantaged.
An aligned recommendation is an increase in the subsidy for the approved basic standard of residential care accommodation to reflect the average cost of providing such accommodation within a region, so that providers of aged care can deliver services on a financially sustainable footing.
The Commission has proposed arrangements for any additional costs of providing aged care services to older people with special needs, such as the homeless, to be identified and appropriately funded. It has also recognised that its proposed reforms for consumer choice may have limited applicability for certain disadvantaged groups, and has instead proposed special funding arrangements such as block funding.
A proposed reform to give seniors greater flexibility in how to use the savings locked up in their principal residence without being forced to sell that property is another step towards making people more financially secure in their retirement.
CHA has previously expressed its support for the Productivity Commission’s recommendations which we are confident will greatly benefit older Australians and the country as a whole.
We have been working alongside other aged care consumer and provider groups with the Government to develop programmes that we hope to see announced in the 2012/13 federal budget next May. We’ve also been working with the opposition who have shown great support for the needs of older people.
It may just be, despite the hung parliament, that a rare moment of political unity delivers aged care reform on budget night next May.
Older Australians deserve to feel secure about their care over the final years of their life. So far, consumers, providers, government and opposition are all working towards this outcome.
We are hopeful this unity of purpose will also extend to the fight against what is shaping up to be the country’s next great health crisis: dementia. Representatives from the CHA network joined a march on parliament earlier this month, organised by Alzheimer’s Australia, to urge politicians to have a greater focus on prevention of dementia, research into its causes and treatment.
A new report from Deloitte Access Economics released in October suggests the number of Australians with dementia, including Alzheimer’s, will increase from about 270,000 at the moment to one million by 2050 unless there is a significant medical breakthrough in the intervening years.
And while we know dementia won’t discriminate along political lines, so all major parties should see the need for better funding to battle the condition, we can also be certain dementia won’t discriminate by wealth.
Once again, it will be poorer Australians who will be most vulnerable as dementia affects more and more people.
So we come back to the underlying question that should be asked: What are you going to do for the least fortunate in society? It is crucial our key political decision-makers continue to recognise the need to provide adequate care to financially disadvantaged Australians as part of their answer.
Martin Laverty is CEO of Catholic Health Australia, the largest grouping of non-government health, aged and community care services in the country.