Long-Term Care Insurance Reform in Singapore

ABSTRACT

In recent years, governments in rapidly aging countries have looked toward the implementation of public insurance schemes to help cover the costs of care for their aging citizenry. This article presents a comprehensive overview of long-term care insurance policy in Singapore. We discuss the successes and challenges of nearly two decades (2002–2019) of policy experimentation with a voluntary long-term care insurance scheme, which was replaced by mandatory social insurance in the 2019 reform. Various aspects of the new scheme, including mode of financing, eligibility criteria, benefit design, and potential impacts are assessed. The article concludes that, in the inherent tension between the breadth and depth of public long-term care social insurance coverage, Singapore has opted for breadth at the expense of depth.

KEYWORDS:

• Population aging
• long-term care
• social insurance
• social policy
• welfare state

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by a research grant from the NUS Initiative to Improve Health in Asia (NIHA) coordinated by the Global Asia Institute of the National University of Singapore and supported by the Glaxo Smith Kline-Economic Development Board (Singapore) Trust Fund.