Abstract
The problem of how to provide long term care to the aged has become one of the most important political and social issues in Japan today. In spite of this, yet relatively little is known about the aged who are receiving long term care from family members. Recently, for example using the 1992 Basic Survey on Natio nal Life, Ogura has shown that, paradoxically, the incidence of long term care is the lowest among the aged in single households of all family types; typically, it is less than half of those in a three generation family.
In this paper, first, we try to solve this paradox, by imputing the institutional population to the general households using the 1990 Census, on the basis of sex, age and marital status. The imputed institutional population is then added to those needing longer term care in each family type, and the rate of incidence is then recomputed for each sex, age class, and family type. As a result of this imputation, for most family types, the rate of incidence has become a smooth rising curve of ages, and single households have the highest incidence of all family types.
Secondly, using these incidence rates, we compute the nu m ber of those aged needing long term care for all municipalities in 17 prefectures and compared the bases of all their municipalities of a hypothetical public insurance for long term care. Two indices are computed for this purpose; the first one being the number of those above 40 years old for each one receiving long term care, and the second one being the number of those above 20 years old for each one receiving long term care. The government is proposing public insurance for long term care operated separately by each municipality covering those above 40 years old or older. Even in terms of prefectures as a whole, our indices show, the strongest, Saitama, which is about twice the size of the weakest, Okayama, in our sample. The distribution of municipalities are quite wide within prefectures. The difference in the insurance taxes, therefore, will be even more pronounced once the regional and local differences in the incidence of long term care which have been ignored in our estimates is taken into account. K
