British Prime Minister Andy Burnham pledged sweeping reforms to England's adult social care system on Wednesday, promising politically difficult decisions to curb what he called unfair costs for users and to build a fairer model that avoids the high out-of-pocket expenses seen in the U.S. healthcare system.
Successive governments have failed to reform adult social care, for which families can pay hundreds of thousands of pounds, after previous proposals were defeated by opposition parties who dubbed them a "dementia tax" or "death tax."
Burnham did not rule out tax rises to fund a new scheme and said that "scare stories" from newspaper headlines would not deter him from tackling a situation that will only get worse as the population ages.
"It's a major dereliction of public duty that parliament has not faced up to this," he told an audience at a care home in north London.
Asked if he could transform social care without raising taxes, he said that more was possible within existing resources, but some of the plans "will require difficult decisions."
