Those younger than the Baby Boomer generation may have missed the release of a Productivity Commission aged care report. Pre-Baby Boomers may wrongly have thought it doesn't impact them.
Anyone who has had to find an aged care home for a loved one will tell you the system is a maze. It's hard to access, and hard to find a way through. It's not able to give everyone what they want.
The reason younger people should worry is that if they have family members, chances are they'll take a crash course in aged care navigation if, without warning, a family member needs care urgently.
Younger people should also know if we don't fix aged care today, the system they'll encounter when they get older may not be sufficient. They'll also be funding it in their working lives through higher taxes if we don't change the current financing system.
The last two years have been unique in aged care. Consumers, providers, and groupings of staff who work in aged care have been mostly unified in arguing what reform should involve. Most agree aged care should be provided to all older people who are assessed as being in need.
Most agree the aged care system should be easy to navigate, and give older people and their families genuine choice of service types. Also, that funding should meet the actual cost of services provided, to ensure that staff are better paid, and that quality standards are met.
These united calls for reform jump out from the 482 submissions the Productivity Commission.
The aged care community has not always been united. The Howard Government reforms in 1997 ensured that bonds are the prism through which many of our current elected representatives and senior journalists approach aged care matters.
Bonds, which are refundable deposits that are returned to a family when aged care accommodation is no longer needed, enable residential aged care services to have capital to build aged care homes.
Bonds have worked well in low care services for the last 13 years. Yet in response to the Commission report some have questioned, and many journalists have rehashed, misunderstandings about bonds; mainly, that the proposals might result in the forced sale of family homes to fund high care bonds.
The Commission has in fact put forward a method that will put an end to the forced sale of a person's family home to fund an aged care bond,