An analysis by Nanako Tamiya, a professor at the University of Tsukuba's Faculty of Medicine, found that regional disparities in long-term care costs per elderly person increased by up to four times in fiscal 1.Since the introduction of the long-term care insurance system in 2019, regional disparities in long-term care costs have often been pointed out.
According to the University of Tsukuba, the survey uses data from the 2019 Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare "Nursing Care Insurance Business Status Report" and the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications "Social and Demographic System", and is operated by small municipalities with a population of less than 2,000 and multiple municipalities. We calculated the long-term care costs per elderly person in 1,460 local governments nationwide, excluding the federations.
As a result, it was found that the annual nursing care cost per elderly person ranges from a minimum of about 1 yen to a maximum of about 13 yen, a difference of 55 times.Even after statistically adjusting the distribution of age and gender for each municipality, the regional disparity reached 4.1 times, suggesting the existence of regional disparities that cannot be explained solely by age and gender.
Professor Tamiya et al.'s analysis revealed that most of this difference can be explained by the rate of people certified as needing long-term care and the ratio of people with a level of 3 to 5 requiring severe care.
Under Japan's long-term care insurance system, users basically pay 1% of the cost of long-term care, and half of the rest is covered by long-term care insurance premiums and taxes.The burden on municipalities is a quarter of the tax, but local governments with a large burden are having serious effects such as financial inflexibility.
According to Professor Tamiya and others, based on the results of this survey, it is necessary to verify whether nursing care costs can be reduced by improving the rate of people certified as needing long-term care and the ratio of people requiring severe care through measures such as preventive care.
In addition, using the public information collected and organized for this research, the University of Tsukuba Health Service Development Research Center and Teruhi Co., Ltd., a venture company originating from the University of Tsukuba, have developed and released a free application "You can see nursing care in your town". .If you enter the name of a municipality, statistics related to nursing care such as nursing care costs, number of people requiring support/nursing care, certification rate, etc. will be displayed in a ranking, allowing you to grasp the actual situation of nursing care in each municipality.
Paper information:[BMC Public Health] Regional variation in long-term care spending in Japan
reference:[University of Tsukuba Health Service Development Research Center] Free app "You can see nursing care in your city"
