This Policy Brief aims to present information, on the one hand, on the current picture of public and private expenditure on long-term care for older people and to discuss the challenges of financing care.
Available data from national and international sources as well as qualitative information gathered in the European Centre's recent publication "Facts and Figures on Long-term Care -- Europe and North America" is used to shed light on these issues. On the other hand - given that user payments for long-term care can be quite high as a percentage of an individual's income (especially for institutional care) - this Policy Brief provides preliminary results on potential redistribution effects of home care benefits (based on SHARE data). By that, the Policy Brief tries not only to take a policy-oriented, comparative view on funding arrangements for long-term care but also to serve as a starting point for further discussions on the potential inequalities associated with the different ways of financing and providing long-term care.
