Aspects of Changes in ‘Evaluation’ of Social Welfare in Japan

: Based on the Long-Term Care Insurance System

Abstract

Following the conceptual arrangement in Hiraoka’s paper, the task of this paper is to clarify what “evaluation” was like in the practical policy processes. The policy processes of the long-term care insurance system in Japan will be taken up. First, I will organize the concepts related to the “evaluation” method that are taken up here. After that, I will scrutinize the minutes from the first meeting of the Social Security Council （Long-term Care Insurance Subcommittee） established in the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare to the latest meeting, and will conduct the content analyses of how the term “evaluation” is used. Specifically, we will confirm the situation in which issues such as “third-party evaluation” and the utilization of the “PDCA cycle” in Insured Long-Term Care Service Plans have received a great deal of attention, and consider their semantics. Finally, let us consider what “evaluation” was like in the long-term care insurance system in Japan. The issue is how “evaluation” was used, and whether “evaluation” here could be a policy evaluation or just a performance evaluation.