ABSTRACT
This chapter shows that care needs, family burdens and formal resources were unequally distributed among gender and social strata before the law was passed. It considers the alternative policies that the Spanish welfare state could have adopted to overcome the negative effects of ageing. Such alternatives are selected from nations representing different welfare regimes in European. The author's data shows that a typology of welfare regimes is still useful for understanding how labour market, family, gender and state are related in long-term care. The chapter analyses some of the major problems in the implementation of this new Spanish legislation. It shows how familialism persists through the provision of cash transfers in spite of the law's intended objective of defamilializing long-term care by the expansion of social services. Familialism is a pattern of welfare organization in which the family provides more social care than the two other providers, namely, the state and the market.
