The future of aged care is home care, for better and for worse

The aged care taskforce report, with its recommendation that seniors be required to pay a significantly larger proportion of the costs of aged care rather than all taxpayers carrying the responsibility, has debuted this week to relatively little angst.

That will change when the government reveals how it intends to implement the recommendations around a pension-based mechanism for co-payments for “daily living services” in aged care, in contrast to caring services, which the report recommends be fully funded by government, and if it adopts the recommendation to allow providers to keep a small portion of the Refundable Accommodation Deposit that clients can currently use for their accommodation costs.