ABSTRACT
It is only recently that long-term care became a major social policy issue in all welfare states. The debate on how to redesign long-term care policies is shaped by an increasing demand for care, changes in formal as well as informal support systems, changing values and attitudes towards informal care-giving and the division between private and public responsibility, as well as incentives and challenges from the social, political and economic environment. Equity has been a central theme of the welfare state from the outset. And equity is an attractive label in social policy making. The equity focus of this chapter is on equity as a social policy objective, on how public policies interfere in long-term care systems by providing, financing, and regulating long-term care in terms of equity. Explicitly or implicitly, welfare state definitions and social policy definitions include notions such as equity, justice or equality, they are even at the core of these definitions.
