CHALLENGES TO THE LONG-TERM CARE POLICY : LESSONS FROM EXPERIENCES OF OTHER COUNTRIES

The world has faced a critical demographic change as the population ageing, and the increased number of elderly people aged over 65 has brought several challenges in the healthcare system. Living longer with good health is not easy, a challenge to all people. The disease trend has been shifted from communicable diseases to non-communicable diseases including cancers as well as support needs of people living with chronical health problems, physical limitations and cognitive impairment that affect their ability to perform every activities of daily living. As results, the expenditures in the healthcare have increased dynamically and most of countries have faced difficulties to sustain their healthcare system, the national scheme social welfare and insurance in particular. Despite many countries have introduced a new scheme of healthcare policies as well as reformed the existing policies, challenges to deal with the population ageing are not yet overcome. In this paper, several healthcare systems, the Long-Term Care policy in particular, are reviewed and lead to some recommendations for sufficient and sustainable systems. Each system has its advantage and disadvantage, meaning there is no perfect policies for healthcare including the long-term care. Keys are not only the hard factors such as available facilities and funds but also soft factors such as management and operation mechanism as well as how to minimalize the moral hazard and to emphasize the importance of prevention in order to reduce the total healthcare expenses. As there is no perfect LTC system or policy yet, it is strongly recommended to use the mixed systems for sustainable healthcare and long-term care system.