Canada would be better served by Long-Term Care Insurance

Professor Ito Peng has a new essay at Policy Options called “Long-term care insurance would better serve Canada’s aging population.” The essay uses evidence from German, Japan and South Korea to show how a universal, public long-term care insurance system could provide Canadians with a continuum of care options from care at home to care in institutions.

Canada should learn from the experiences of other countries. Germany, Japan and South Korea made fundamental changes to their LTC systems well before COVID-19 hit. They made transformative shifts by replacing their patchwork systems of LTC provided by local and regional governments with universal, national public LTC Insurance (LTCI). In the process, they turned LTC from primarily a private family responsibility to a family, community and state collective responsibility.

Ito Peng