Showing posts with label Dementia tax. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Dementia tax. Show all posts

Winter fuel/Dementia tax

Winter Fuel Payments: 
The Conservative manifesto also includes a commitment to means test the Winter Fuel Payment which, if linked to Pension Credit, could remove the support to heat homes from ten million pensioners. 
But analysis by the Labour Party has found that even this could be an underestimate, as 40 percent of those eligible do not claim Pension Credit. This would leave a further 800,000 older people without support to heat their homes, bringing the total number losing out to 10,800,000. 
Resolution Foundation analysis of Conservative plans to means test the Winter Fuel Payment:  DWP estimates of benefit take up, showing 40 percent of those eligible for Pension Credit do not claim: 
Dementia Tax: A 75 year-old owner occupier with savings of £20,000, whose home is worth the UK average house price of £217,500 facing home care costs of £100,000. Under the current system: subject to income, would pay nothing towards their care costs.
At a cap of £72,000: would pay £72,000 – would use all their savings and have a 24 percent charge (£52,000) set against the value of their homeAt a cap of £100,000: would pay £100,000, the full cost of care
AVERAGE CARE COSTS: Analysis for the Dilnot Commission in 2010 found that 45 percent of 65 year olds could expect to spend (or have spent on them) more than £25,000 on care services, and 10 percent could expect to spend more than £100,000. Source: Dilnot Commission Report Vol 2: Evidence and Analysis 
AVERAGE WEALTH OF OLDER PEOPLE: 34 percent of older people aged 70-79 have non-housing assets below £23,250 but assets including houses above £100,000. Source: IFS, based on English Longitudinal Study of Ageing, wave 7  HOUSE PRICES: Average House Price (Feb 2017) in the UK is £217,502 Source: Land Registry .
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Dementia tax?

It is currently Dementia Awareness Week.....



The policy

The new Tory policy is to give the financial services industry the opportunity to administer the asset stripping of elderly people who are unfortunate enough to end up with dementia, physical infirmities or other conditions that require social care.

If the elderly person is deemed to have assets worth over £100,000 (the average house price in the UK is £215,000) then they will be treated as if they are rich and made to pay their own social care costs, even though they payed a lifetime of National Insurance contributions to cover the cost of health and social care in their old age.

The Tories have ever-so-kindly said that the elderly people won't have to sell their homes immediately in order to cover the costs, but that they can get "equity release" products so that the wealth can be extracted from the value of their homes after they die.

Creating a new market

One of the obvious beneficiaries of this policy will be the financial services industry who will get to design and market these "equity release" products.

A consideration of the root cause of the social care problem just goes to show how depraved this is. Here's a simple timeline of events.
  • The financial services industry gambles itself into insolvency betting on all kinds of dodgy sub-prime mortgage junk.
  • The Labour government steps in to save the banks and avert financial catastrophe by borrowing hundreds of billions to prop up the banks and salvage the nose-diving economy.
  • The Tories use this high level of borrowing as an excuse to launch their ideological austerity agenda, and set about slashing government spending.
  • One of the worst affected areas is social care which suffers £4.6 billion in Tory cuts (at a time of rising demand). 
  • The Tories announce a plan to force pensioners to pay for their own social care by asset stripping the value of their homes.
  • The financial services industry are handed a lucrative new "equity release" market to profit from, and the Tory press describe this kind of corporate equity extraction scheme as if it's some kind of wonderful favour to the elderly that they're being allowed to live in their own house as its equity is harvested away by the banks that screwed the economy in the first place!
Warped priorities

It's funny how the Tories can afford to squander £billions in tax revenue by slashing the corporation tax rate from 28% in 2010 to just 17% in 2020, but they're dressing this Dementia Tax up as some kind of necessary evil.

The cost of these corporation tax cuts stacks up to a mind-boggling £70 billion giveaway to corporations between 2015 and 2020, but somehow they're telling us we're so broke that we can't even afford to look after our elderly people when they get ill in their old age.

Don't ever let the Tories try to convince you that social care can't be afforded. It can. They just don't want to pay for it because they see elderly people's houses as rich pickings.

Theft

The pro-Tory mainstream media have worked tirelessly to actually try and dress this depraved policy up as a good thing, but there's no other way of seeing it than as a move to asset strip elderly people for the "crime" of falling ill in their old age.

These elderly people have paid tax and National Insurance their whole lives, while working hard to save and buy their own homes. Now "Theresa May's Team" have decided that they don't actually deserve the health and social care that they paid for through their taxes because the Tories and their chums see their homes as lucrative low-hanging fruit to be harvested in order to fund even more tax breaks for corporations and the super rich.

Making people fund their own social care by asset stripping them is a theft of all of those years of National Insurance contributions.

The workaround

Once upon a time a fresh faced Tory MP called George Osborne appeared on the Daily Politics and advised a caller that it's easy for rich people to get the taxpayer to pay for their social care if they set up tax-dodging scams to hide their assets.

This self-serving Tory mentality has not changed.

Selfish "I'm alright Jack" types will skirt around the Tory Dementia Tax in exactly the way that George Osborne advised, while ordinary people who worked their whole lives to buy their house and wouldn't dream of setting up tax-dodging scams will be the ones to be hit by it.

People who didn't buy their own property won't be hit by it, people who see no moral problem with tax-dodging schemes won't be hit by it. The only people to be hit by Dementia Tax will be the hard-working people who are naive enough to actually behave honestly and play by the rules in Tory Britain.

Conclusion

It's hard to tell if the Tories decided to launch such a depraved policy in the middle of dementia awareness week out of sheer incompetence, or whether it's their sick idea of a joke.

Whatever the case, a plot to allow financial services industry to asset strip dementia sufferers has to be one of the most inhumane manifesto pledges ever devised.

Still. Millions of people are going to go out and vote Tory because they see the corporate administered asset stripping of dementia sufferers as a price worth paying for whatever (almost certainly imaginary) benefit they think they'd personally get from a Tory government.

 http://anotherangryvoice.blogspot.co.uk/
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