In common with most politicians, the obvious is stated here as if it’s something they have only recently discovered. The reality in fact is that Government has ignored repeated cries from the whole of the care sector and its representatives and has elected to aim its funding directly at the ‘Bullseye’, the NHS. It is spectacularly easy to keep announcing monies for the NHS in order to tick a political box, and not deal with the ‘writing on the wall’.
Sadly, and predictably the Government’s aim is way off the mark and representative of a failure to read that same writing. The Green paper has still not moved on and so the limbo continues painfully and distressingly for many, many people.
Certainly, the advent of an insurance back scheme has its merits but are we not creating a monster here? Will the ‘insured’ be allowed to select their own care provider or will the insurance companies in effect become the commissioners of care and lay down their own criteria of what constitutes care and how it is to be delivered and by whom. Moreover, there would be concerns about the minimum standard of care they would be prepared to pay out on.
We could see a race to the bottom with more care being delivered my untrained, unsupervised, unskilled, uninsured individuals or micro-companies that can escape the responsibilities that all organisations registered with the Care Quality Commission must adhere to. That fosters safeguarding and further problems from that point on.