Aged care levy considered to improve quality of the sector

In a bid to address years of negligence in the aged care sector, Minister for Aged Care Anika Wells has hinted that a levy is being considered to fund much need improvements for the sector.

Wells suggested a levy was on the table during an appearance on ABC’s Insiders in which she stressed the need for an “honest, responsible and mature discussion about what aged care is going to look like in this country”.

“I would say we’re still not advocating any particular proposal,” she said.

“What we are saying is that we are opening up a taskforce, like you said, short, sharp, to deliberate for six months on how to move forward.”

The way our aged care system is funded is unfair and unsustainable.

It also stifles innovation and choice.

We must do better for older people now and for future generations.@InsidersABC pic.twitter.com/KX6vHjc7aU

— Anika Wells MP (@AnikaWells) June 11, 2023

While Wells didn’t commit to the levy she did explain that the task force has a “genuine duty” to consider a levy and a user pay system.

“I think we need a system that people feel like they’ve got a choice about where they go and if they have the means to pay for it, they can do so,” she said.

“[People] want more options, they are prepared to pay for higher quality care, but they can’t find it, so my job is to create the policy settings to allow those things to be built so people can find it.

“This is just one policy area that has been allowed to drift as ‘too hard’ for decades and decades.”

While the opposition labelled the suggestion of a levy as “lazy”, a 2021 study from the Australian National University found that more than eight-in-10 Australians support a tax-based levy to improve aged care.

At the time, the study of more than 3,200 Australians’ attitudes to aged care found less than one-in-three Australians had confidence in the aged care system.

Study co-author Professor Nicholas Biddle said the findings paint “a very timely, and sadly very bleak, picture of the state of aged care according to Australians and our overall faith in a system that has come under close scrutiny in recent years.”

“We found that across Australia, just 1.8 per cent of people had a ‘great deal’ of confidence in the aged care system and Around 31.1 per cent of said they had ‘quite a lot’ of confidence,” Biddle said.

“In contrast, more than half, 55.2 per cent, said they did not have ‘very much confidence’ and 12 per cent said they had ‘no confidence at all’.”