Did some reading up on the dementia tax thing. How do people feel about it? I can see why the tories wanted to do something about it.
To summarise if you have dementia you are likely to need 24 hour care. Other disease diabetes cancer etc is free.
Current care for dementia is means tested including your house although your house doesnt apply if you have some relative/family dependent on your house.
Currently the nhs spends 26 billion pounds on social care for dementia. What that doesnt say is how muhmch is recouped (or whether the 26 billion include this).
This does sound like a massive amount of the budget going on this.
The company I work for has invested billions of dollars into finding effective treatments for Alzheimer's, without success so far (one failed at the final hurdle last year - it worked, in that it did what we thought it would do but the difference it made to people was not enough to make it viable) but we are still trying. Many other companies and researchers are doing the same thing. Cameron and the French government were actually very good at supporting this. There will be treatments, I think within the next five years. But there will not be a cure, these treatments (and it's likely to be a cocktail of different things, like the amazing success in taming HIV) will slow, or in the best case scenario stop, progression of the disease. They will depend on a very early diagnosis, preferably before there are noticeable symptoms, which we are simply not set up to do at the moment - huge amounts of money are also being invested in simpler ways to screen - at the moment it takes an expensive scan with radioactive imaging media or a spinal tap. The drugs themselves will be expensive. In this country all the cost of this will fall on the NHS.
The best possible solution would be some kind of preventative that we could all take, or that could be put in the water.....no one is even dreaming of this yet.
The care of people with dementia should be by health care professionals in my view, this is a physiological condition, a physical disease. Take it out of the social care arena entirely, avoid the 'you pay for yourself' scenario. Payment should be a mix of general taxation and some kind of insurance scheme, where the majority of us who do not develop dementia subsidise those poor people who do. Premiums according to income. Of course it would be handy to have a continual supply of young, tax paying, low public service using workers to pay into the system, but our views on immigration would seem to preclude this.
The good news is that the prevalence of dementia is actually falling, especially amongst men, due to lifestyle changes. So the numbers per 100,000 who will get dementia are going down. The real numbers are going up because of demography, the boom in numbers of over 65s. Eventually (probably not in my lifetime) these changes plus effective treatments will hopefully radically reduce the burden.
The final part of the jigsaw for me is giving people the right to opt out definitively when their quality of life has collapsed or can be predicted to do so soon, i.e. assisted suicide. From about the age of 40 your wishes in the event of contracting a variety of diseases - dementia, motor neuron disease, etc - or when your quality of life hits a certain level due to pain, loss of independence, personality change etc, should be the subject of discussion with your GP, e.g. When the disease gets to stage x I want out, or never end my life unnaturally etc. These wishes should be recorded and reviewed annually, and adhered to when you reach stage x, if you ever do. At the moment my greatest fear is that I **** up the timing of my trip to Dignitas if the worst happens.
PS it's not quite a lottery who gets dementia - genetics and lifestyle play a significant role. Sadly if you are already unfit and have a chronic disease the odds go up. Still not definitive predictors though.
