Diritti e copertura della long-term care in Europa : un approccio economico

In the context of an unprecedented aging process, the role of domiciliary formal care for older adults is becoming increasingly essential. Understanding the design, scope and the legislation of main public programmes of long-term care (LTC) is essential to estimate the coverage of care programmes, and identify potential inequities in access to care. In this paper we highlight the large heterogeneity in the rules for accessing public LTC in European countries. We show how such differences stem from the absence of a unique definition of need-of-care. This implies that individuals with the same clinical profile may have very different eligibility status to LTC, depending on the local legislation. Employing microdata from SHARE and ELSA, we show how this is likely to result in inequities in care coverage. We then discuss the social and economic relevance of our findings.