Aged care and home care used to be something that you could worry about later in life, or, frankly, leave for your kids to worry about for you. But the recommendations delivered in the final report of the Aged Care Taskforce this week leaves us in no doubt: aged care and home care services are about to become something you need to plan for at retirement.
There were three big takeaways for me in the report for everyday people. The first is that people should be planning for their care needs when they plan for their retirement. The second is that we should expect to pay for the standards of accommodation and services that we want to have in our later years of life, and only look to the government to support our care needs.
Workers in the care sector will more than double over the next 40 years.Credit: istock
And third, if we don’t want to pay for aged care accommodation by the day for long periods of time, that we really should look hard at where we are planning to live in our later years in life, and prepare for ageing better.
This will be a big shake-up for the aged care system. Some might see the suggestions as positive, others will feel like they might lose out. And we won’t know which recommendations the government will adopt or how they’ll implement it until the budget leaks start.
There’s no question that the government will continue to help those who cannot afford to pay for care. But for everyone who owns their own home and has a healthy super balance, you need to take this seriously. Here are three things we all should understand.
The government offers four levels of home care packages, each of which give people a level of in-home clinical care, and access to a range of other more basic care and support services. The consumer can drive how this is spent to suit their needs, within the list of approved services.
We can get angry, shake our fists at change, or we can get on with it and plan for our futures.
There are no obvious plans to change this. In fact, the taskforce supports this continuing, possibly only with a decrease in focus on non-clinical services.
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