Financial gaslighting: The financialisation of care in later life

Abstract

The world’s population is ageing, and the provision and sustainability of aged care services are urgent. Like structural reforms in similar settings, aged care has been subjected to the logics of financialisation, yet few studies examine its mobilisation in aged care. Drawing on nearly 900 submissions to the Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety in Australia, we provide insights into how financialisation presents in an aged care setting and its implications for older people. The study draws on three features of financialisation to explore its effects on everyday life within this context: the ‘assetisation’ of the home; the rhetoric of choice used to shift risks from the state to people; and the discourse of financial literacy, which has cultivated individual responsibility for the management of aged care. We argue that older people are ‘financially gaslit’ into believing that the provision of aged care is designed to support autonomy, choice, and information symmetries when, in reality, financialisation in aged care involves significant wealth transfer from individuals to private providers. Given the unevenness of home ownership at retirement, the variability in the capacity to exercise informed choice in later life, and the spectrum of financial literacy, we find that the current model displaces responsibility for funding aged care onto those in need of care. In turn, responsibilising people to make complex financial choices about the care needed in later stages of life ensures that substantive financial risks are shifted to those amongst the community’s most vulnerable.