Battle looms on National Disability ­Insurance Scheme shortfall

ANY move to plug a $6bn NDIS with money from the aged-care system would be fought “without relief” by the sector, experts say.

ANY move to plug a $6 billion hole in the National Disability ­Insurance Scheme with money from the aged-care system would be fought “without relief” by the sector and could lead to a funding crisis, experts say.

The annual funding shortfall — identified by the NDIS actuary and revealed by The Weekend Australian — is due to the previous government’s failure to properly model the ageing of people covered by the scheme.

The resulting $6bn shortfall represents almost half the $12.9bn spent on aged-care services by state and federal governments in 2012. The Coalition government has not identified from where in the budget the funding would come. The chief executive of one national aged-care group told The Australian the money to fill the shortfall could not simply be raided from the sector because it was already underfunded.

“Anybody who sees this as a simple reallocation of funding is flat-out wrong,” he said. “Australia’s population is ageing at a rapid rate and the quantum of funding available for the vast majority of people who won’t have access to the NDIS needs to rise in tandem or we will have a crisis on our hands.”

The development of the NDIS also risks creating a two-tiered system for those reliant on care after the age of 65. Everybody covered by the NDIS can chose to stay with the scheme for life, while anyone else with a disability who turns 65 or who develops a disability after that age will instead be covered by the existing aged-care system.

Council on the Ageing chief executive Ian Yates said the interface between the disability scheme and the aged-care system needed to be fixed. “We need to have means testing and proper targeting across care whether that is in the NDIS or the aged-care system,” he said. “If we are looking at a way to fix that interface than it has to take into account the principle that people who have the ­capacity to pay should pay.”

The Productivity Commission recommended support under the NDIS be neither capped nor means tested because people could not plan for disabilities as they could for growing older. It did, however, recommend people at the pension age or beyond should make a “capped co-contribution” to their care regardless of the system they were in, according to their financial means.

Combined Pensioners and Superannuants Association of NSW senior adviser Charmaine Crowe said she maintained the organisation’s support for people remaining in the NDIS after they turn 65 but conceded the lack of modelling on the cost was “sloppy”.