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Zulat proposes to advance immediately a national long-term care insurance law.
We are presently witnessing a serious crisis in the collective long-term care insurance, which is managed through the health funds and operated by private companies, due to the latter’s decision to exit this area of insurance or to drastically change eligibility conditions when claims are filed. Ever since the 1980s, when long-term care in the community started to evolve, caring for elderly and disabled patients has largely shifted from institutional care (which removes patients from their home, family, and community) back to the home, where they are provided assistance to pursue as active a life as possible.
Zulat’s position is that there is no logic or justification for profit-maximizing entities to be entrusted with providing a response to long-term care. The time has come to promote a thorough national solution to long-term care and include it in the basket of health services, to enact a national long-term care insurance law, raise the health tax, and merge the budgets of the Health Ministry and the National Insurance Institute in order to provide full public funding for long-term care in the community, in addition to home care.
The Israeli public’s spending on long-term care insurance, both collective and private, is significantly higher than in European countries. As noted, the state fully finances institutional care only, a policy that takes advantage of the fact that most people favor home care and will therefore pay for it out of their own pocket.
The solution is national long-term care insurance and ending the differentiation in funding between institutional and home care. Long-term care in Israel exemplifies the state’s abdication of its obligations to its citizens, first and foremost its elderly. Israel places most of the responsibility for long-term care on the elderly themselves and their families. The health funds’ collective insurance had provided a partial solution, which has now proven to be short-lived.
Zulat’s position is that a national long-term care insurance law must be advanced immediately, incorporate it into the National Health Insurance Law, and dispense with the private insurance companies. Such a law would ensure that all residents of Israel have the right to age with dignity even if they require long-term care and to receive such care per their choice, in the community or in an institution.
Such a law ought to examine the manner in which long-term care is provided, including the policy on employment and remuneration of caregivers and the advancement of collective housing solutions that allow for living within a community rather than just at home, as is customary around the world.
