There has to be a radical change in thinking to address failures in aged care. Moreover, the same failures must not be allowed to befall disability services.
The government’s anticipated spending announcement about aged care in next month’s budget looks to be well short of what is needed to deliver the changes identified as necessary by the aged care royal commission.
In what looked like an actual scoop rather than a traditional budget drop, Nine’s James Massola reported at the weekend a plan to increase aged care funding by $10 billion over four years. But how small $2.5 billion a year is in the face of the sector’s problems was demonstrated by a report from the Grattan Institute yesterday.
Stephen Duckett and his colleagues accepted the figure put forward by the royal commissioners that aged care was $9.8 billion a year worse off than it should have been because of funding cuts by successive governments, and argued for that funding to be restored.
Read more about the challenges facing the government over aged and disability care…
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