Population aging and changing family patterns have made elder care an important issue. In 1994, German law-makers enacted a major reform in the country' s long-term care policy, the Dependency Insurance Act (DIA). How, and in what way, will the relative use of formal and informal long-term care...

This paper deals with the coverage of long-term care (LTC) in Germany since the post-war period. Until the 1990s, long-term care was mainly a task of the family with means-tested, tax-financed care assistance as a last resort. In 1994, after two decades of political debate, the German parliament...

This chapter provides an overview of the German long-term care insurance. We document care needs and wellbeing of the elderly population. Moreover, we provide a detailed description of the German long-term care institutions (sources of finance and types of benefits), the professional care work...

There is a general consensus in considering the public financing for LTC as a suitable proxy of the resources committed to elderly care by each Government. But the preciseness of this approximation depends on the extent to which LTC is representative of elderly care within a country. We...