Abstract

Due to an increasing proportion of elderly people in the Netherlands and the necessity of saving expenditures, the Dutch government is forced to make significant changes in, among others, its healthcare policies. This, in short, means that from the year 2015 on the government decentralizes some of its authority to the municipal level and generally supports informal care. In this study I concentrate on the most needy target group, the elderly, and their viewpoints on receiving care from someone in their social network (i.e. mainly relatives). Out of twenty semi-structured interviews with younger (60 until 75 years old) and older (aged above 75 years) elderly it appears that receiving informal care is undesired. This is based upon people’s experiences during the past few decades in which old age facilities were professionally and equally available to everyone. Moreover, informal caregiving does not seem to fit into Dutch norms on family ties anymore. The healthcare reform, then, may possibly lead to unintended consequences such as increased social inequality, poor quality of care, and deteriorated interrelationships whereby both the informal caregiver and recipient suffer. …víceméně