ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the claims of the care market model (CMM) from the perspective of financial sustainability to demonstrate it is not merely an impractical, armchair theory. Among these claims, while citing the CMM conditions, the universal care system, which is often criticized for being too costly, is considered. The number of universal care recipients is certainly many times greater than that of means-tested care, as universal care is for everyone, but means-tested care is for the economically vulnerable only. In the universal care system, the responsibility for the minimum necessary long-term care is essentially placed on public expenditure, and so instead, it greatly reduces private expenditure on long-term care. Investigating the merit good model and scale of economies, it was clarified that the cost efficiency of the universal care system is rooted in the small income gap of markets with the universal care system. This indicates that a small income gap is a precondition for the universal care system.
