Madam, - I would like to make a suggestion to Mary Harney about who should pay for the care of the elderly. The best way of ensuring there is enough finance to provide decent, long-stay nursing home care for those older people who need it is to include coverage of this risk by contributory social insurance.
Since 1995 German employees pay 1.7 per cent of their income towards "compulsory long-term care insurance". Employers also contribute at different rates. These contributions can then be used for nursing home care, care for accident victims or care at home.
From my German colleagues in the European Parliament I have learnt that the German state contributes about €1,400 a month towards average nursing home bills of €3,000 a month.
Only about 5 per cent of over-65s need to spend a long time in a nursing home because of infirmity caused by stroke or other illness. Yet for that minority and their relatives long-term nursing home care can be ruinously expensive, as the Tánaiste and others have recently pointed out. One reason for the high cost is that there is a lack of good-quality private nursing homes. It is a sellers' market, as anyone will testify who has tried to find a nursing home bed for a relative with a long-term illness.
Social insurance is the best way to meet this risk. At a small cost per week from employers and employees, social insurance contributions, paid over people's working lives, would provide ample funds to cover the contingency of needing long-term care.
It would raise the standards of such care, which at present are often miserably low, by channelling significant extra resources from social insurance funds towards high-standard nursing home provision.
It would help reduce the burden of worry and concern from the minds of everyone who has older relatives, or who contemplates the time when they themselves will be old.
While providing social insurance against the costs of nursing home care will not solve all the problems of care for the elderly, it is a vital part of a solution. Ireland should introduce it. I would like to urge the Tánaiste, the Government and all parties in the Dáil to advocate its speedy introduction here.
This is a piece of European social policy, pioneered by Germany, which all other European countries could usefully emulate. - Yours, etc.,
PATRICIA McKENNA, MEP, European Parliament, Brussels, Belgium.