Times are Tough: A legal perspective on making and saving money in aged care

I'm getting ready for a speaking slot at the upcoming ACSA Finance & Aged Care Sector Symposium at Crown Perth on 19 February 2020. The theme is 'Financing tomorrow's aged care sector'.

Details here -

The topic I have come up with is, 'Times are Tough: A legal perspective on making and saving money in aged care'. I am going to run through about 5 thrifty or entrepreneurial ideas that I have seen aged care clients implement in the past, which I think could be done on a larger scale across the sector.

The purpose of this LinkedIn article - apart from a shameless plug to drum up some interest in my talk - is to pose a question that has been weighing on my mind during this exercise:

To what extent can the Government be expected to fund Australia's aged care needs of the future?

I am no CFO, but I realise that money is critical. Without it, the sector comes to a grinding halt. But where will it all come from?

The peak bodies have described 'ongoing continual decline' and an ‘unsustainable' aged care sector (eg: https://www.australianageingagenda.com.au/2020/01/15/peaks-say-aged-care-sector-unsustainable/ ).

The Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety, in its November 2019 Interim Report, identified a need for urgent action to provide more Home Care Packages and reduce wait lists.

Clearly there is a funding problem.

But as the Royal Commission also said in its Interim Report:

... there have been calls from several quarters for government funding to aged care to be significantly increased, without waiting for our Final Report and recommendations. These interventions are essentially variations on a theme which has haunted this area of government policy for far too long: short-term solutions which will at best temporarily stave off the worst problems and, at worst, produce another set of unintended outcomes ... 

The Government responded to the Interim Report with a $537 million funding announcement. But general consensus is that this was not enough.

In fact, every aged care funding announcement seems to be met with media releases to the effect that:

'[INSERT NAME OF BODY] welcomes this announcement, but calls on the Government to do more'.

Stakeholders will continue to ask for more; and I'm not suggesting anyone should be asking for less.

But what about the very compelling opinion pieces that offer comments such as this? -

‘If we want to get serious about actually fixing our broken aged care system, we’ll need to start by confronting some hard truths. So here’s one: the aged care funding crisis is now so deep the government can’t realistically fix it with taxpayers’ money’.

Source: https://www.afr.com/policy/health-and-education/unlock-housing-wealth-to-fix-aged-care-20200110-p53qad

Maybe you think the Government is doing enough; or maybe you don't. Maybe you think the Government should do more, and can do more. Or maybe you think the Government simply doesn't have the dollars to do much more.

How do you think the aged care sector can:

?Please let me know by commenting or emailing: [email protected]