Eligibility to Long-Term Care in Italy: A novel fuzzy approach and its implications on coverage

We propose a fuzzy approach for allocating home-care allowances to older people affected by functional or cognitive limitations. Population ageing makes access to care a crucial challenge for Western economies. Public programmes of care in Europe determine access to carebenefits using rule-based approaches which aggregate basic health-outcomes into eligibility categories. Focusing on the Italian Toscana region, we show how such legislations violate basic properties of monotonicity and continuity, thus potentially increasing inequity in care access. By using micro-data from SHARE, we show how a fuzzy approach to the eligibility determination would increase care-coverage to sick individuals previously left uncovered, lower the average benefit among receivers, and increase total spending.