Population ageing coupled with a growing burden of disease and disability will cause long-term care needs to increase considerably around the world. Yet despite changing demographics, many countries do not invest adequately in long-term care systems. This chapter sets out the reasons that long-term care is often underprioritized by governments and begins to consider why countries need a re-think when it comes to the way they care for older adults.

This chapter concludes by summarizing the evidence presented in the book and considering the way forward by re-visiting the arguments in favour of investing in long-term care and the costs of inaction.

One major implication of the previous two chapters is that the politics of ageing is actually the politics of inequality – not a chimera of intergenerational inequality, but rather the inequalities that scholars of politics, social policy and health have long studied and understood (Lynch, 2020). As chapter two showed, one of the problematic assumptions of the ‘ageing crisis’ narrative is precisely the belief that older populations are homogeneous in their experience and outlook. This ignores the significant health inequalities which exist amongst older populations and overlooks the degree to which the costs of an ageing population are actually rooted in these inequalities. Without this framing, debates about intergenerational inequalities and the ‘ageing crisis’ are a distraction from both the deep social inequalities that exist in terms of gender, geography, race and ethnicity, socioeconomic status and the ways in which these social inequalities produce inequities in health. Intentional or not, to focus on intergenerational inequalities diverts attention from the real inequalities that shape people’s lives and the politics of ageing and health.

Older people are not a homogeneous social group. Their needs and abilities, and the costs associated with providing for their well-being, vary with their socioeconomic status, gender, geographic location and health status, among other relevant dimensions of difference. It should come as no surprise, then, that older adults are not a politically homogeneous bloc, either. In public and policy conversations there is very often a tendency, however, to assume that older people are a singular pressure group that will act through the political system to secure a distribution of societal resources that primarily benefits them – as retirees, health care consumers, people without young children in the house, and the like. If governments fail to invest in policies that can promote well-being across the life-course, and instead focus on maintaining social expenditure on the current generation of older people by squeezing current workers/future retirees, the story goes, it is because most governments are subject to greater pressure from older voters than from younger citizens, because the former vote at higher rates and are represented by powerful lobby groups. This argument was memorably summarized by the late British journalist Henry Fairlie, writing in The New Republic in 1988, as a problem of ‘greedy geezers’ living well at the expense of the young (Fairlie, 1988).

This book has, we hope, destroyed two straw men that are common in debates about intergenerational equity, spending and health. The first is the myth of ‘greedy geezers’ – the stereotype of a pampered pensioner, living off lavish old-age provision including fine health care, while voting against investments in future generations. The second is the myth of unsustainability – of health care costs driven by ageing that make it impossible to finance a welfare state. The two straw men arguments come together in a call for cuts to public health care and other public service provision: the former by demonizing older people, the latter by suggesting that public provision, unlike private finance, is unsustainable. The images of greedy older people and an ineluctably increasing financial burden associated with ageing both strengthen the argument against public provision.

The preceding chapters raise three issues that are crucial to understanding the politics of healthy ageing. First, older voters are not as powerful nor as unified as many politicians, think tanks and commentators often believe. While some elderly voters have preferences for policies that are in their own interests or in the interests of their children and grandchildren, older voters are not sufficiently homogeneous to act as a voting bloc. Indeed, even if they were, it is not clear that their influence on policy would be substantial because policy decisions are not simply determined by voters’ demand. Second, in those few contexts where political conflict over policies is framed intergenerationally, the wellbeing of older people can be preserved without being at the expense of other groups, particularly those of working age. Reframing the debate in this way helps societies move from policies which individualize the responsibility of being healthy – by withdrawing government investment – to an emphasis on healthy ageing which seeks to establish cross-class/cross-generational coalitions. Third, inequalities in healthy ageing are structured according to other kinds of inequality in the social determinants of health, and these upstream inequalities are best understood when situated in a life-course perspective which recognizes that inequalities in ageing are the product of inequalities that manifest at much earlier stages in life. Not everybody gets to be old.