NOW it makes sense! ‘Dementia tax’ is an INSURANCE SCAM

It all makes sense if you think about social care as a commercial opportunity – and the Tories think all health care is a commercial opportunity.

The Dementia Tax, as it has been dubbed, is nothing more than an attempt to create a grubby little insurance market.

To explain, take a look at this (originally written by Alan Newman, I’m told, in response to a post by the terrific Peter Stefanovic):



For those who can’t read Facebook screen grabs very well, a commenter to This Site has typed it all out as follows:

“The Conservatives will attempt to soften the blow by promising that pensioners will not have to sell their homes to pay for their care costs while they or a surviving partner are alive. Instead, ‘products will be available’ allowing the elderly to pay by extracting equity from their homes, which will be recovered at a later date when they die or sell their residence.

“I have just seen this post online:

“‘People need to read the small print associated with this because its a lot nastier than it looks.

“I work in the City. The insurance industry was approached by the Government several months ago with the aim of creating a new market for a new product.

“This arrangement is a culmination of those discussions. You wont have to sell your house PROVIDED that you purchase an insurance product to cover your social care. The “premiums” would be recovered from the equity after the house has been sold and the Insurance company will have a lien on the house and can force a sale if it wants to. So your offspring cant keep it on the market for long in order to get the best price.

“The real kicker in this is that in order to encourage the industry to market these products the government guaranteed that there would be no cap on the premiums.

“This was in some ways “atonement” for Osborne’s destruction of the highly lucrative annuities market. This means that the premiums could be up to (and including) the entire remaining equity in the property after the government has taken its cut. Companies will be falling over themselves to get their snouts in this trough.

“In short your offspring and relatives could get absolutely nothing from your estate.

“If you buy one of these products you need to read the small print very very carefully indeed because there will be some real dogs on the market.

“I suspect that this is another financial scandal waiting to happen, but by the time it does May will be long gone.'”

I wonder if a company called Unum has had anything to do with this?

http://voxpoliticalonline.com/2017/05/19/now-it-makes-sense-dementia-tax-is-an-insurance-scam/


Come on you turkeys, vote for Christmas there's good little turkeys.

It makes sense when people vote for Tories and they hate Tories

What can I say

It is clear the Conservatives want to privatize the NHS.
Of 75 MP's with links to private healthcare companies, 85% are Conservative.
http://socialinvestigations.blogspot.co.uk/p/key-facts-of-lords-and-mps-connections.html?m=1

Can I just clarify what this tax is? At the moment, people have to sell their houses to pay for their care if they go into a home, but they don't have to do that if they have care at home? The proposal is to extend that to make them pay if they have care at home if they have more than £100,000?

Does it include any care for any reason?

Talking about this on LBC.
Wife gets dementia spends 5 years in nursing home.Then dies.
Hubby cannot sell his house as there will be a trust on it to deduct her costs. 

So he is stuck there for his own life and he  cannot move nearer his children.
Unless he put it in an offshore trust first.

Just like the ùber rich do

Angry Andy wrote:Talkung about this on LBC.
Wife gets dementia spends 5 years in nursing home.Then dies.
Hubby cannot sell his house as there will be a trust on it to deduct her costs. 

So he is stuck there for his own life and he  cannot move nearer his children.
Unless he put it in an offshore trust first.

Just like the ùber rich do

That's not a new thing though is it? She's been in a care home.

Watch the news.

The ghastly old harriden is performing a massive U turn on her hated Dementia  tax. 

Looks like she is watering it down with an as yet unknown cap.

She knew that if she ran with it,it could cost her the GE.

I guess that a lot of people keep their relatives out of care homes because they don't want the family house to be sold, and this new "dementia tax" would change all that, yes?

Have people always had to sell their houses to pay for care home fees?

There are council-run care homes for people who don't have money, I've worked at a few and they're bloody horrible.

The scam as proffered in the O/P is simply a "repackaging" of an old-fashioned "three shells"/"smoke and mirrors"/"compounding interest" charges trick, offered time and again by usurious lenders/financial companies/insurance companies...

Lending against the equity in a property, no payments are required while the owner is still alive and kicking -- but the overpriced interest charges keep on adding up, interest on interest multiplying month-by-month, year-by-year  -- until when the owner finally dies, her/his family find that the interest is 300% -->> 400%, or more on top of the original loan !  Effectively meaning that the person's estate no longer has little or any equity in the property.. And with the lender having it's lien (i.e. a mortgage..) over the property, the estate often has little choice but to either sell, or hand the property over !

In other words, legalised theft of someone's family home, with total support of the incumbent government.
Vote Conservative..  Reap the benefits  !!!          

If you like your kids enough to give them an early inheritance, then this is easily avoidable. People are doing this now.

And assuming they block this in the future, you can envelope your house in a company and allocate shares.

A bit of tax advice - totally free.

Social Services nor the NHS are paying care homes enough for the staffing required.

And people take advantage of loop holes to avoid topping up.

Unless you want your relative in sub par care, where the staff are stretched, the money has to come from somewhere. Or you look after your own, with miminal state assistance.

Down here in Oz, only a minority of the elderly -- maybe around 20--25% or so -- end up in retirement homes/aged care/nursing homes;  and less than 20% will die in hospitals and hospices...

Leaving the great majority living out there lives independently;  with some 2/3rds either dying at home, or when out and about somewhere..


There is a lot of scare_marketing and deliberately fostering fears underlying the formation of the sorts of scams described in the O/P. And, if badly handled, there is also the added risk of a surviving spouse, and/or other family members, being turfed out of the family home, if the property is titled in the one principal spouse/parent's name.

And bad luck if the family was hoping to pass on a "family home" down throuhg the generations, if one parent was worried enough as to sign up to some usurious insurance company scam..


When death duties and capital gains tax on family homes was still in place in Australia back in the the 1960s and '70s, stories abounded of a surviving spouse and children losing their home to the state after the death of one parent, usually the father as the chief breadwinner back then...

And that is just one reason, why there is so much distrust generated whenever tricky financing schemes are mentioned..