Pensioners deserve better! (From St Helens Star)
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Pensioners deserve better!
10:05am Thursday 19th July 2012 in Letters By Reader letter
Pensioners deserve better!
THE government has been spectacularly slow in getting to grips with the issue of care funding and now we have been told we will have to wait until the end of next year before we get an answer.
We’ve had more than 20 reports which have all showed how the current system is in crisis and needs urgent attention, but the government seems incapable of understanding what urgent means for the 1m older people who are currently struggling with an inadequate care system.
Suggestions that people should pay up to £75,000 towards their care before the state steps in are outrageous. Why is social care one of the few areas that we don’t fund through general taxation, like education, the armed services and the NHS?
Instead we say to frail elderly people you are on your own; use your savings, sell your house and get on with it. We urgently need a National Care Service paid for by everyone so that we share the cost of care and ensure everyone gets the support they need in later life.
The white paper is short on ideas to solve the care crisis. There is no attempt to end the unfair postcode lottery which allows different councils to charge different amounts for an hour’s worth of care, no effort to widen access to care services for the 800,000 people who are currently excluded from the system, and no end to the means-test which penalises many people with small savings and a modest home.
Under these proposals people will still end up having to pay for care by selling their homes, the only difference will be that it will be done after they’ve died.
Many local councils already offer such as scheme and often its interest free unlike the government proposals. Whichever way you look at it, it’s a death tax. It’s also very doubtful that people will take out costly private care insurance. The vast majority of people will keep their fingers crossed and hope it doesn’t happen to them.
Finally our most senior pensioners sacrificed their youth fighting for freedom against the dark forces from Europe, rebuilt our country, built an NHS on low wages and could not afford things like a second pension, THEY DESERVE BETTER.
Trevor Prescott, St Helens Delegate, North West Regional Pensioners Association.
Comments(3)
Sankey
says...
2:26pm Tue 24 Jul 12
papyt
says...
5:11pm Fri 27 Jul 12
Bill Bradbury says...
9:33am Tue 24 Jul 12
If I could have climbed into that garden through the TV I am afraid I would have been had up for serious assault so insensed I was.
But she was right. NOBODY OWNS THEIR HOME. IT BELONGS TO THE STATE. It cost my mother £800/week (cheaper to put her into the Midland Hotel) and the sale of her house when she should have been cared for in hospital with dementia which the Health service denied until on her death certificate was the word Dementia. What I think of these people I could not put in writing.
So the answer is rented accomodation, own nothing and spend what you have in savings. A crazy system.
But the Government has realised that the only people with disposable income these days are the elderly and so fair game to raid their savings and homes to make up the deficit. We have become the pariah of society.