[543g43g43]

It is - like everything else, our response to Covid has just accelerated anything that was already in decline. The best we can hope for is a well-managed transition to a hybrid healthcare system that all of the other sensible countries use.

>the social care system is broken

Here, you are talking about social care for old folks. The relevant question here is - why has it got worse over the past 2 years? What we had before wasn't great - old folks basically sold everything they had so minimum-wage staff could care for them in their dying last few years, and needed constant attention from NHS-provided services. Which part of that is now properly broken, and why?

[ben_w]

Other thing that happened in the last two years: Brexit.

A post about this from two years ago: https://www.ageuk.org.uk/our-impact/campaigning/care-in-cris...

[543g43g43]

Paying cheap imported labour to care for isolated elderly people certainly was an "already broken" system.

[andyjohnson0]

> Which part of that is now properly broken, and why?

Residential social care (primarily for elderly people, but also for younger people with specific issues) is mostly provided by the private sector and part-funded by the state. The amount that the state will pay care businesses to provide that care hasn't kept pace with their costs, and private care homes are increasingly ejecting loss-making residents and/or closing-down completely. This has been going on since at least 2017 and is starting to accelerate as energy costs increase. The state has very little residential care capacity left.

Home-based care is also a mess - again due to lack of funding. Salaries don't compensate for the job stress, and people still working in the sector are over stretched and burning out. So people who might have been able to live semi-independently in their own homes are pushed into the residential care system which (except at the high-end) is crumbling.

Again, its a system/coordination problem. I'd argue that part of the problem is inherent complexity, but a bigger part is that the politicians who are setting policy are ill-equipped to deal with these types of problem because very many of them believe in market-only solutions. When a system gridlocks like this, they don't know what to do.