Many European nations share a political challenge: the ageing population and recessionary economics lead to dwindling resources for welfare services, while scandals and reports of unacceptable deficits in particular in care services for older people arise. In Finland this situation was responded to with a novel Care Act for Older People that was passed in 2013. This paper tracks the legislative process of the law and demonstrates how this issue of fundamental values and resources was turned into a question of apolitical governance and expert management, resulting in a dubious, status-quo supporting law. It presents a case of how the subsumption of homo politicus in the neoliberal era in practice can happen, and how depoliticisation can function in a context with which neoliberalism is not often associated;namely care policy of a traditionally social-democratic Nordic welfare state.
The increasing presence of for-profit service providers in publicly-funded eldercare has transformed care in Nordic welfare states which have a strong tradition of public care provision. Macro-level research on care policies has mainly focused on public institutions, national policies, and marketization. The financialization of eldercare has not received much scholarly attention, and existing studies mostly focus on the UK. The financialization of eldercare refers to the ways in which care is both a site of profit extraction and financial engineering. The Nordic system is relatively universal, and, with rapidly ageing demographics, there is a secured demand for eldercare services. However, these services have been heavily marketized over the past two decades, opening up lucrative possibilities for financialized actors who have established a stronghold over the markets. We analyse these processes through selected empirical examples from Finland, and argue that the financialization of eldercare in the Nordic context demands attention as we are witnessing a new configuration between the constitutional order of the welfare state, public finances, and private profit which is neither transparent, nor democratic.
The rights of older people to care have become a major political and legal issue with the ageing populations of many European and OECD countries. argues that while the Act is ambitious and symbolically significant, it remains unsatisfactory in practice. This is the case especially for people with dementia, who end up being disadvantaged. We compare the Elderly Care Act with other relevant legislation, in particular legislation pertaining to disability services, and estimate the significance of the law from the perspective of older people with dementia. We also discuss the situation in Finland in relation to the global situation of people with dementia as the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities was recently ratified in Finland. We show that disability legislation, rather than elderly care legislation, should be the framework through which the right to services should be secured for people with dementia.
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