Financing long-term care: Some ideas from Switzerland comment on “financing long-term care: Lessons from Japan”

Abstract

Ikegami reviews the implementation of mandatory long-term care insurance systems in Germany and Japan, which are organized as pay-as-you-go systems. I propose to go one step further and implement a multi-pillar, mandatory and voluntary long-term care financing system, which combines pay-as-you-go with capital-funded elements. The proposal is based on the observation that Switzerland has implemented a three-pillar system for financing retirement provisions that can be adapted to finance long-term care in a fair and sustainable way.