Stereotypes about wealthy baby boomers are skewing aged care policy. New fees, the shift to Support at Home, and pressures on community services risk leaving many older Australians without affordable, safe support. The consequences will be felt across families, hospitals and future generations.

Baby boomers, the first of whom will turn 80 next year, are now stereotyped as being cashed up and greedily expecting to spend the rest of their lives living off the public purse. It isn’t that simple.

The false stereotype of the cashed up baby boomer has shaped many of the aged care changes introduced in 2024 and 2025. Rightfully concerned about the budget implications of more people drawing on taxpayer-funded aged care services in the years ahead, the government introduced a new Aged Care Act in 2024 and announced a new Support at Home program that went live on 1 November 2025.

While the rhetoric of a rights-based aged care system that accompanied the Act was welcomed by key stakeholders, the central change is not more rights. Instead, it’s a massive increase in fees and charges. Many older people will not be able to afford these fees. This has not stopped government and aged care peak bodies repeatedly heralding the changes as a once in a generation reform.

There is no doubt that the number of baby boomers moving into old age has big budget implications. The average age that a person begins to need support at home is 80, with many people needing more comprehensive support at home by their mid 80s. People typically begin to need residential care in their late 80s and 90s with needs increasing year on year.

In 2035, just 10 years away, there will more than two million people aged 80 or above in Australia. That is a 60 per cent increase in a decade. This is what has governments worried.

In contrast, the number of people 65 to 79 years will increase by a million people (only 32 per cent). This difference is important. Despite being worried, governments still plan services for older people on the assumption that old age begins at 65 years. In doing so, many government projections are massively underestimating future needs. This is one of the many reasons why we do not have the workforce or the funding we need now and will need in the decades ahead.

What a person pays for their care in old age depends on their income and assets. The two major parties have a bipartisan policy to exempt the family home from the assets test.

As age increases, so does the percentage on the pension. Only 30 per cent of people in their late 60s are on a pension, so most of this cohort could afford aged care. But this is not useful as most people in their 60s do not need aged care.

In contrast, the people who need aged care the most are those who increasingly cannot afford it. The percentage of people on the pension progressively increases as time goes on, reaching 75 per cent by age 80. By age 85, only 13 per cent of the population has more than $100,000 in superannuation. These are the age groups who typically have aged care needs that progressively increase each year. By the time they move into their late 80s and 90s, most people are on a full pension and with few assets except the family home.

This might change as the impact of the 1992 introduction of compulsory employer contributions to superannuation ripples through the decades. But, for now, people needing aged care typically have little or no superannuation or assets except the family home if they own one.

One reason why so many older people have little or no superannuation is because people use up their superannuation in their 60s and early 70s before moving to a pension. But the bigger reason is that the majority going into very old age are women. Women have always had much less superannuation than men. Many women of this older generation worked in the family home and were never in the paid workforce to accrue superannuation. Few women who did work were able to accrue any significant superannuation savings after a lifetime of earning less and having workforce breaks to care for children.

Nevertheless, the stereotype of the rich baby boomer has shaped the changes to aged care introduced in 2025. In particular, there is a strong belief in government that it cannot increase government funding to better support older people at home because any increase would exacerbate intergenerational inequity.

The government is wrong about this for at least three reasons.

First, it misses the point about inequity among baby boomers. While some baby boomers are extremely wealthy, many are going into old age with very little in superannuation and assets and some with literally no savings or assets at all.

Second, it is a false economy. If an older person does not get the support that is necessary to live safely at home, they will end up in an emergency department, a hospital ward or a nursing home, all of which are much more expensive than support at home. Ultimately, every taxpayer contributes to paying for these at a higher cost and therefore more taxes.

Third, if the government had the political will, it could introduce an aged care levy that sits beside the Medicare levy and that does not kick in until the taxpayer is half way through their working life (say, at age 45).  The fact is the government does not have the political will to better support older people at home. This is a political choice and it is not immutable.

While most people think that all aged care is residential care (nursing homes), only 14 per cent of aged care is in fact residential. For people in residential care, the major change introduced in 2025 is a significant increase in fees and charges.

Capital funding of residential aged care remains as a major problem that the government has not addressed except by hitting residents for higher fees. Australia now has a residential aged care shortage of about 10,000 beds and that number will only increase over time.

The majority of aged care (86 per cent) is delivered in the community. Two central changes to community aged care were introduced in 2025. The first is the introduction of an expensive new fee-for-service program called Support at Home (SAH). It has replaced existing Home Care Packages. The new Support at Home program is transforming community aged care into a for-profit market that favours large and for-profit providers and that is funded through a massive increase in consumer fees. Small community providers do not have the financial reserves to survive in this market.

Being a transactional fee for service system, it is necessarily more expensive than aged care delivered by non-profit aged care services and funded by government grants. The early indication is that SAH is costing about twice as much per service hour than equivalent services delivered through the Commonwealth Home Support Program (CHSP).

The second change to community aged care is the proposed destruction of CHSP. CHSP is a Labor legacy after being introduced 40 years ago by the Hawke government. It is largely delivered by not-for-profit community aged care providers such as Meals on Wheels, community transport, and state and local government services such as neighbourhood centres and community nursing. It is the only part of the aged care system which has consistently performed well over the last four decades.

While initially proposed for closure and amalgamation in 2025, it’s demolition and amalgamation with Support at Home will not occur until “at least 2027”.

With the reason to demolish it now lost in history, and with evidence that Support at Home is twice the cost, it is curious that the government has not yet changed its position on the future of CHSP. This is particularly the case because we are in a time of strict fiscal austerity and because the impact of abolishing CHSP would be fully felt right at the time of the next federal election in 2028.

The aged care changes introduced in 2025 look like they will work well for articulate wealthy retirees who have no cognitive impairment and who are physically and mentally capable of navigating the My Aged Care maze.

Even at this early stage, there is growing evidence that Support at Home will leave everybody else worse off and increasingly reliant on family carers. People without family carers who are financially, physically and emotionally able to care for them will end up in public hospitals because public hospitals are now the only remaining safety net when things go terribly wrong.

People with special needs will be particularly disadvantaged. The needs of First Nations peoples and people in rural and remote areas are now being reframed as ‘thin markets’. There is no workforce strategy to address service or workforce shortages nor any strategy to make aged care financially affordable and culturally safe. The same issues apply to various extents to culturally and linguistically diverse communities and LGBTIQ+ communities. There is no profit to be had in ‘thin markets’ and no real attempt is being made to secure an adequate supply of CHSP services as a viable alternative.

It is easy for younger people to see inadequate home aged care as being an old person’s problem that has nothing to do with them. They could not be more wrong. At the personal level, almost every older person living with inadequate support is part of a family and increasingly reliant on family carers. This is increasingly causing real family stress with carers (typically mothers and daughters) left to juggle the care of children and parents with a career and the need to earning enough to cover the rent or mortgage.

At the system level, older people who are not safe in their own homes do not simply sit there quietly saving the system money. They are going to residential care prematurely if they can find a bed. They are presenting in their thousands to public hospitals at a greater cost to taxpayers and at the expense of everyone else who requires acute access to a hospital bed. This includes young people.

Finally, while it is not intentional, community aged care based on volunteering and community development is being progressively destroyed in favour of a more expensive and inefficient private-for-profit fee-for-service system. Today’s young people, and tomorrow’s gig economy workers, will never be able to afford Support at Home when their time comes.