Aged care could fail like child care
The Gillard Government is determined to apply market-based policies much further, including aged care according to a University of New South Wales academic, David McKnight, writing in The Australian.
The Associate Professor says that “Labor’s backroom policy wonks show little awareness that real-world market models have unintended consequences. One is market failure, as was the case with ABC Learning,
“Its meteoric rise and fall holds many lessons for Labor’s plans to extend the market.
“For a start, its expansion did not necessarily mean more choice, or that better regulation can control events.
“Models that rely on user choice to improve standards have a crucial flaw. They assume users can recognise quality.
“Researchers have found, for example, that a large number of parents cannot distinguish higher quality services from those of lower quality. There are also emotional complications: research has found that in convincing themselves that they have acted in the child’s best interests, parents may overestimate the quality of the long-day care they have purchased.
“All this has ominous lessons for the aged-care sector, which is still dominated by not-for-profit and religious providers,” Associate Professor McKnight argues.
“It’s next in line to be taken over by giant care corporations with their inherent conflict between the goals of profit and care,” he warns.
