Ian Owen’s Comment piece argued that the state ‘cannot afford to fund the increasing demand for long-term care’ and ‘individuals will have to make greater provision for themselves’(‘Neither free nor easy’, July 24–30).
In fact, of course, the limits on the affordability of any given service are the national income as a whole and the way we choose as a society (through markets and the ballot box) to allocate it between different desired ends.
Whether we then fund a desired level of provision individually through user charges or collectively through taxation raises a host of second-order issues. These include: the pooling of risk; the distributional consequences; and the relative efficiency and sustainability of public and private provision. But none of these is about affordability in the aggregate.
The assertion that people can mysteriously afford to do things individually that they can’t afford to do collectively bedevils not only the care debate but also discussion of health care, pensions and other issues. It is a lazy argument, which should disqualify those who deploy it from serious public policy debate.
David Griffiths
Huddersfield
