Financial sustainability and the financing of long-term care systems

Adelina Comas-Herrera, Martin Knapp and Ricardo Rodrigues

Chapter 10 in Research Handbook on Social Care Policy, 2025, pp 152-167 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: This chapter explores different mechanisms and approaches to long-term care (LTC) financing, considering their sustainability, as well as efficiency, fairness in access and coverage and distributional issues. Financing is considered in terms of two functions: raising revenue to enable the production and delivery of care, and resource allocation. We argue that unpaid support provided by family or other carers is a key form of financing and should be included in evaluations of the equity, efficiency and sustainability of different approaches to financing care. After reviewing different financing mechanisms and their strengths and weaknesses, we conclude that it is key to ensure that care systems are consistent with existing institutions and infrastructures and we highlight the potential of preventing care needs in addressing the sustainability of LTC systems. Finally, we argue that not addressing the challenges of financing LTC may become increasingly unsustainable from a social and political point of view.

Keywords: Long-term care financing; Long-term care expenditure; Inequality; Out-of-Pocket Payments; Insurance; Comparative (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
ISBN: 9781839103681
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.elgaronline.com/doi/10.4337/9781839103698.00018 (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 403 Forbidden

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:elg:eechap:19597_10

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.e-elgar.com

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Chapters from Edward Elgar Publishing
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Jack Sweeney ().