Funding Options for Long-Term Care Services in Latin America and the Caribbean

Across Latin America and the Caribbean, demographic and social changes have led many countries to place long-term care on their social policy agendas. But to implement these policies, countries must overcome major obstacles that include estimating service costs and defining funding sources to ensure financial viability and sustainability. The lack of data on potential demand, underdeveloped services, and a fragmented existing supply make it difficult to produce these estimates. This publication helps fill this information gap by estimating the potential cost of four long-term care service packages with various levels of coverage (low, medium, high and full) for 17 countries in the region. It also assesses the feasibility of the different funding mechanisms in order to identify their main advantages and disadvantages, based on each countrys context.