Overview
As global populations age, governments around the world are investigating how to fund long-term care (LTC) in an equitable and sustainable manner. The research reported here has three objectives: (i) to identify and classify middle-income countries (MICs) and highincome countries (HICs) that have established LTC for older populations; (ii) to describe the financing features and undertake a detailed assessment of the public LTC programmes in these countries; and (iii) to identify and discuss the benefits, disadvantages and challenges of the different public LTC financing strategies, based on the experiences of high-income countries and on observations of the reviewed countries.
The public LTC financing system of 13 countries is reviewed: five HICs (Australia, Japan, Netherlands (Kingdom of the), Singapore and Uruguay), and eight MICs (China, Costa Rica, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Serbia, South Africa and Thailand).
Resources
- Cheng, Terence C., Winnie Yip, Zhanlian Feng. 2024. “Public provision and financing of long-term care: case studies in middle- and high-income countries.” World Health Organization, Center for Health Development. https://wkc.who.int/resources/publications/i/item/public-provision-and-financing-of-long-term-care-case-studies-in-middle–and-high-income-countries