Long-term care financing becomes visible to families at precisely the point when they have the least time to understand it. An older person who has been largely independent develops dementia, loses mobility after a hospital admission or begins to require help with everyday activities. The family then discovers that paying for care is not one transaction. Healthcare, home assistance, medicines, equipment, transport, day support, housing adaptations and residential care may sit within different funding arrangements, while relatives contribute substantial unpaid time alongside whatever formal provision can be secured.
Argentina's long-term care economy reflects this complexity. There is no single national long-term care insurance scheme through which every person progresses according to one standardized entitlement. Instead, financing is distributed across social insurance, national programs, provincial and municipal services, PAMI, private purchasing, household resources and unpaid family care. The wider Argentina Aging, Long-Term Care & Community Support Knowledge Hub places these arrangements within the country's broader demographic, service and governance landscape.
The financing challenge is therefore larger than determining how much Argentina spends on care. It concerns how financial responsibility is distributed, which needs attract formal funding, which costs are transferred between institutions, what households are expected to absorb and whether funding arrangements encourage prevention, independence and continuity or make intervention easiest only after needs become severe.
As Argentina ages, these questions will become increasingly consequential. A sustainable financing model does not necessarily require one national payer. It does require greater clarity about who is protected, what support can reasonably be expected, how different funding streams connect and how the country will prevent rising care needs from becoming an increasingly unequal burden on families.
Argentina finances care through several overlapping systems
International comparisons of long-term care expenditure can obscure an important distinction. Some countries have developed recognizable long-term care insurance or tax-funded entitlement systems. Argentina's arrangements are more plural. Older people's support sits across institutions whose primary purposes are not always identical.
PAMI, the Instituto Nacional de Servicios Sociales para Jubilados y Pensionados, is particularly significant. Alongside healthcare, it provides social services for affiliates that include assistance associated with dependency and frailty, day services and long-stay residential provision. These services give PAMI a substantial position at the boundary between health, social support and long-term care.
But PAMI should not be treated as Argentina's universal long-term care system. Coverage, eligibility and particular benefits have their own rules. For example, PAMI describes its long-stay residential benefit as non-universal and subject to socio-health assessment. Provinces and municipalities also fund or provide relevant services, other coverage arrangements exist, households purchase care privately, and nonprofit or community organizations contribute additional support.
Understanding funding and payment models in Argentina therefore requires looking beyond any single budget. The real financing architecture includes formal public expenditure, social insurance resources, private payments and unpaid labor.
This matters because each source carries different risks. Public funding is exposed to fiscal pressures and competing priorities. Social insurance depends on its own contribution and transfer arrangements. Private purchasing depends on household income. Unpaid care depends on the availability, health and economic circumstances of relatives. A system may appear financially sustainable within one institutional account while transferring increasing costs into another.
PAMI occupies a distinctive position between social insurance and long-term support
PAMI's importance arises partly from the population it serves and partly from the range of services within its remit. It is not simply a healthcare payer. Its social-service pathways include support for people experiencing dependency and frailty, day services and residential care, creating opportunities to respond to needs that cross conventional health and social boundaries.
That position has important financing implications. An older affiliate's needs may evolve gradually from healthcare and relatively limited assistance towards extensive everyday support. If different parts of that trajectory are considered separately, financial decisions can become disconnected from the person's overall needs.
Residential care illustrates the issue. PAMI's long-stay residence model is intended for older affiliates requiring assistance and care with activities of daily living who cannot be supported in their existing environment, subject to socio-health assessment. The service includes accommodation, food, care, nursing, psychosocial support, occupational therapy, recreation and low-complexity health services. It is therefore inherently multi-dimensional.
Funding such a service cannot sensibly be analyzed only as accommodation or only as healthcare. Its costs arise from housing, staffing, food, clinical support, social participation, infrastructure and governance. The same principle applies to intensive home support: apparently simple assistance can require supervision, travel, training, coordination and contingency capacity.
This creates a wider policy lesson. Sustainable financing depends on understanding the real cost of a care model rather than reimbursing only its most visible activity.
Funding follows institutions more easily than it follows people
One of the recurring difficulties in fragmented care systems is that budgets are usually organized around institutions, while people's needs cross institutional boundaries.
An older person recovering from a stroke may require medical treatment, rehabilitation, personal assistance, equipment and modifications to the home. Each element can have a legitimate funding route, but the person's outcome depends on all of them working together. A well-funded hospital episode followed by inadequate community support may still produce poor value if the person loses function or returns to hospital.
The distinction is important because financial control and system value are not the same thing. An organization can remain within its budget by narrowing what it funds, even if the resulting unmet need creates larger costs elsewhere.
A more mature financing approach therefore examines the entire pathway. Relevant questions include whether investment in rehabilitation reduces subsequent dependency, whether home support prevents avoidable institutionalization, whether caregiver support makes a home arrangement sustainable and whether better transitions reduce repeated hospital use.
This does not require every service to be funded from one budget. It requires financial decision-makers to understand the consequences of shifting cost across organizational boundaries.
Scenario: the cheapest discharge can become the most expensive pathway
A 76-year-old man in Córdoba experiences a stroke. Acute treatment is successful and he is medically ready to leave hospital, but he has reduced mobility and needs help with dressing, bathing and preparing meals. His wife is willing to support him but has arthritis and cannot safely provide physical assistance.
From the hospital's immediate financial perspective, discharge ends the acute episode. From the household's perspective, however, the costs are only beginning. The couple may need equipment, transport to rehabilitation, paid assistance or changes to the home. If adequate support cannot be organized, his wife may attempt tasks she cannot safely perform and his rehabilitation may become less effective.
A narrow funding model sees these as separate expenditures. A system-value approach asks what combination of support is most likely to preserve function and prevent avoidable deterioration. Temporary intensive rehabilitation and home assistance may cost more during the first weeks after discharge but reduce longer-term dependency.
The important governance question is not whether every subsequent cost belongs to the hospital. It is whether the wider system can identify the financial consequences of an incomplete transition. Tracking functional recovery, delayed support, repeat emergency use and changes in care intensity can reveal whether apparent savings are simply deferred costs.
This is where preventative value and early intervention become financing concepts rather than only clinical or social-care principles.
The household is already a major financing institution
Long-term care economics cannot be understood through government expenditure alone. Households finance care directly when they purchase assistance, transport, equipment, medicines or residential services. They also finance it indirectly when relatives reduce employment, decline work, travel regularly to provide support or perform unpaid care that would otherwise require formal labor.
These contributions are economically real even when no invoice is generated.
Family care has deep social value and many people want to support parents, partners and relatives. The policy problem begins when willingness is treated as unlimited capacity. A daughter who provides several hours of care each day may eventually reduce paid employment. A spouse may provide physically demanding assistance despite their own health conditions. A family living at a distance may purchase private care because no relative can be present.
The distribution of these burdens is also unequal. Unpaid care is strongly associated with gender, and households with greater financial resources have more options to purchase substitutes for their own time. Lower-income families may face a more constrained choice between reducing employment and leaving needs insufficiently supported.
For that reason, family care and care burden need to be included in any serious assessment of long-term care sustainability. A financing model that controls public expenditure by increasing invisible household labor is not necessarily controlling total social cost.
Making the hidden care economy visible
Better financing policy begins with better visibility. Argentina needs to understand not only the number of formal services and places but the scale and intensity of support being provided outside them.
Useful population intelligence would connect several dimensions: functional need, living arrangements, availability of informal support, formal service use, unmet need, household expenditure and geographic access. This does not mean creating intrusive records of every family relationship. It means recognizing that formal demand represents only part of actual care need.
The distinction becomes especially important for forecasting. If demographic projections are translated directly into expected demand for residential places without considering home support and family capacity, future requirements may be misjudged. Equally, assuming families will continue absorbing rising need at today's apparent cost can conceal growing pressure until arrangements fail.
Organizations and system partners examining similar questions can use the Community Impact Report Builder to structure evidence about outcomes, community effects and wider value. It is not an Argentine financing instrument, but the underlying discipline is relevant: expenditure should be connected with what changes for people, households and communities rather than reported only as service activity.
Sustainable financing depends on what Argentina chooses to fund
The future financing debate is not simply about finding additional money. It is also about deciding which forms of support deserve priority and how funding can influence the shape of the care system.
If resources predominantly become available after dependency is severe, the system will naturally remain oriented toward high-intensity responses. If rehabilitation, home support, caregiver assistance and community participation are easier to fund earlier, there is greater opportunity to preserve independence.
Prevention in long-term care should be understood carefully. Aging cannot be prevented, and not every disability or progression of dementia can be avoided. The objective is not to promise that early intervention eliminates future care. It is to reduce avoidable deterioration, maintain function where possible and prevent manageable needs from becoming unnecessarily intensive because support arrived too late.
This is why reablement and restorative care can have financial as well as human significance. Time-limited support following illness or functional decline can focus on regaining ability rather than automatically replacing tasks indefinitely.
Funding design should nevertheless avoid crude assumptions that every preventative service generates immediate cash savings. Some interventions improve quality of life without reducing expenditure. Others may reduce future demand but require substantial investment first. A mature system distinguishes improved outcomes, avoided cost and actual budget savings rather than treating them as interchangeable.
Scenario: financing independence rather than permanent dependency
An 83-year-old woman in Rosario fractures her hip and returns home following surgery. Before the injury she lived independently, shopped locally and managed her own personal care. After discharge she needs assistance getting in and out of bed, preparing food and bathing.
One response would be to establish continuing assistance around everything she currently cannot do. That may be necessary initially, but if the funding arrangement has no mechanism for active rehabilitation and reassessment, temporary dependency can become embedded into the service model.
A restorative pathway would fund a period of coordinated rehabilitation and home assistance with explicit functional goals. Support workers would encourage safe participation rather than automatically performing every task. Progress would be reviewed, equipment adjusted and the level of assistance reduced where her abilities return.
The financial case is not that every person will recover completely. Some will need permanent support. The value lies in ensuring that the funding model does not inadvertently reward service volume while ignoring restored independence.
At system level, outcomes would need to distinguish hours delivered from changes in function, confidence, falls risk and subsequent care intensity. This gives decision-makers a stronger basis for deciding where restorative approaches are effective and where continuing support remains necessary.
Economic volatility complicates long-term care planning
Long-term care requires unusually long planning horizons. A residential service cannot recruit and develop a skilled workforce instantly. Home-care networks require supervision, transport and local capacity. Training investments take time to mature. Buildings and digital infrastructure have multi-year lives.
Argentina's history of inflation and macroeconomic volatility makes this particularly difficult. Care services are labor-intensive, meaning that changes in wages and employment costs affect provider viability directly. Food, utilities, transport, medical supplies and building maintenance create additional pressures. At the same time, households purchasing care privately can experience rapid changes in affordability.
A reimbursement or subsidy that appears adequate when established can lose purchasing power if it does not adapt appropriately to changing costs. Providers may respond by reducing capacity, delaying investment or shifting costs elsewhere. Workers may leave for better-paid opportunities, creating continuity problems even where nominal service funding remains in place.
Financial governance therefore needs to monitor the relationship between payment levels, actual delivery costs, workforce conditions and service availability. The purpose is not to guarantee every provider's business model. It is to identify when financing arrangements are producing predictable risks to access or quality.
This makes provider finance and sustainability part of long-term care assurance rather than a purely commercial concern.
Prices, payments and quality cannot be governed separately
Long-term care is highly sensitive to labor costs because personal support cannot be fully mechanized. A residential service needs sufficient staff across the day and night. Home care includes travel and scheduling as well as direct contact time. Dementia and complex needs can require greater supervision and specialist competence.
If payment arrangements are disconnected from these realities, providers face difficult trade-offs. They may struggle to retain experienced workers, invest in training or maintain staffing resilience. Conversely, increasing payments without expectations about quality and outcomes does not automatically improve care.
The stronger approach links financing with a transparent understanding of service requirements. Payment decisions should be informed by the workforce model, intensity of support, infrastructure, geographic conditions and reasonable quality expectations. Assurance should then examine whether funded capacity is actually being delivered.
That relationship matters particularly where public or social-insurance organizations purchase services from external providers. Contractual or reimbursement mechanisms become one of the ways public objectives are translated into everyday care.
The Quality Dashboard Builder can help organizations structure a limited set of indicators connecting capacity, quality and outcomes. In Argentina, the measures themselves would need to reflect local services and requirements, but the governance principle is transferable: financial oversight becomes stronger when leaders can see whether changes in cost, staffing and service performance are moving together.
Federal variation makes territorial financing visible
Argentina's federal organization means that care resources and responsibilities cannot be understood through national expenditure alone. Provinces and municipalities differ in population structure, fiscal capacity, service infrastructure, workforce supply and geography. Metropolitan areas face different operating conditions from sparsely populated rural territories.
Those differences create legitimate variation in delivery costs. Home support in a dense urban area can schedule several visits within a relatively small radius. The same model in a rural part of Patagonia may involve long travel times and fewer available workers. A nationally identical unit price could therefore purchase very different levels of actual capacity.
Territorial equity does not necessarily mean identical expenditure per person. It means that financing arrangements recognize the additional cost of making reasonable access possible in different environments.
This requires combining demographic and financial information. Governments need to know where older populations are growing, where family support networks are changing, where workforce supply is weakest and where existing services are concentrated. Without that visibility, historical funding patterns can persist after population need has shifted.
The wider theme of rural and underserved communities is therefore directly connected to financing design. Geographic inequality cannot be addressed solely by declaring national eligibility if viable services are not funded where people live.
Scenario: equal funding does not always create equal access
A provincial program funds home assistance using a broadly standardized allocation. In a large city, providers can recruit from a substantial labor pool and organize compact schedules. In a remote locality, the same funded hours require workers to travel significant distances between households, while specialist supervision is harder to obtain.
On paper, both communities receive the same entitlement. In practice, the rural service struggles to fill vacancies and cannot reliably deliver the allocated hours. Families begin covering missed support, and some older people move temporarily or permanently closer to relatives in larger towns.
A territorial financing review would distinguish the nominal allocation from the cost of making it deliverable. Travel, workforce scarcity, supervision and contingency capacity would become visible. Alternative models might include clustered schedules, stronger links with primary healthcare, mobile multidisciplinary support or digitally enabled specialist supervision where appropriate.
The lesson is not that rural services should automatically receive a particular premium. It is that funding adequacy should be tested against real delivery conditions. Equality of inputs can coexist with inequality of access when the cost of providing the same practical opportunity differs substantially between places.
A dedicated long-term care funding system is one option, not the only reform route
Internationally, population aging often generates debate about whether long-term care should have a dedicated insurance or entitlement model. Such systems can make financial responsibility more visible and create a clearer relationship between assessed need and benefits. They can also require substantial contributions, administrative capacity and political agreement about eligibility and cost sharing.
Argentina could study these models without assuming that institutional transplantation is appropriate. Its existing social-insurance structures, federal responsibilities, economic conditions and established role for PAMI create a different starting point from countries that introduced dedicated long-term care insurance within other fiscal and administrative environments.
There are several broad reform directions that can be considered separately or in combination:
- strengthening existing PAMI and territorial long-term care pathways;
- developing clearer nationally agreed principles for access and quality;
- expanding targeted public financing for home and community support;
- creating more explicit mechanisms for supporting family caregivers;
- improving coordination between health expenditure and long-term support; and
- over time, examining whether a more dedicated financing mechanism would improve universality and predictability.
The sequence matters. A new financing mechanism cannot by itself create workers, services or effective governance. Additional money entering a weakly mapped system can increase expenditure without necessarily improving continuity or equity.
Financing reform needs a stronger evidence base
Good long-term care financing requires more than aggregate expenditure figures. Decision-makers need to understand what is being purchased and what outcomes follow.
Useful evidence includes service utilization, functional need, waiting periods, workforce availability, unit costs, geographic coverage, household contribution, hospital interfaces, residential demand and outcomes over time. Importantly, the data should allow decision-makers to distinguish between different populations and levels of need.
That creates a challenge in a system where information is distributed across institutions. Data may be collected for administrative purposes that do not align neatly with long-term care planning. Definitions can vary. Private purchasing and unpaid care are particularly difficult to observe.
The objective should not be perfect information before decisions can be made. It should be progressively better financial intelligence.
For broad scenario planning, the Digital Twin Scenario Modeler illustrates how leaders can test relationships between workforce, capacity, demand and service stability. It does not predict Argentina's national expenditure or replace actuarial analysis, but the scenario principle is valuable: financing choices should be stress-tested against plausible changes in demand, workforce availability and service capacity rather than assessed only against a static current-state budget.
Scenario: testing tomorrow's budget before tomorrow arrives
A provincial authority sees a gradual increase in the number of older residents requiring support. Its immediate budget remains manageable, but residential occupancy is rising, home-care providers report recruitment difficulties and hospital teams increasingly encounter delayed discharges where families cannot organize adequate support.
A conventional budget exercise might apply an expenditure increase to each existing service line. A scenario-based approach starts differently. It models several plausible futures: continued reliance on family care, expanded home assistance, greater investment in restorative support, faster growth in residential demand, and worsening workforce scarcity.
Each scenario has different consequences. Expanding home care requires workers who may not currently exist. Increasing residential capacity creates substantial recurring expenditure and infrastructure requirements. Supporting caregivers may delay some formal demand but cannot substitute indefinitely for services. Rehabilitation may reduce dependency for some people but not everyone.
The exercise does not produce one mathematically certain answer. Its value is exposing assumptions before they become commitments. Leaders can see which variables have the greatest effect on cost and capacity, identify information gaps and establish indicators that show which scenario is beginning to emerge.
Long-term care financing then becomes adaptive rather than purely reactive. Budget decisions can respond to evidence of changing need instead of waiting until queues, hospital pressure or provider instability make the change unavoidable.
Workforce funding is infrastructure funding
A long-term care budget that does not consider workforce sustainability is incomplete. Care is delivered through relationships, judgment and practical assistance. Even sophisticated technology cannot replace the human labor involved in bathing, mobility support, dementia care, rehabilitation, reassurance and social connection.
Funding therefore influences more than the number of hours purchased. It affects whether organizations can recruit, train, supervise and retain workers. It influences continuity for people receiving care and whether experienced staff can develop specialist skills.
Argentina's workforce strategy also needs to consider the relationship between formal and informal care. Expanding paid home support can create employment and reduce household burden, but only if care work is sufficiently attractive and sustainable. Poorly paid or insecure roles can reproduce gender inequality within the formal workforce rather than resolve it.
Training is important, including gerontological and home-care competencies, but qualifications need an employment structure around them. Career progression, supervision, safe workloads and recognition influence whether training investment translates into lasting capacity.
This makes workforce data and capacity planning a central component of financial forecasting. Future demand should be translated not only into pesos or service places but into the number, distribution and capability of people required to deliver care.
The Predictive Workforce Risk Module provides organizations with a structured way to examine vacancy, turnover, retention and continuity risks. It is not a national workforce forecasting model for Argentina, but its underlying logic is relevant to providers and system partners seeking to understand when workforce instability is becoming a threat to funded service capacity.
Caregiver support belongs inside financing policy
If unpaid care is part of the system's productive capacity, support for caregivers should not be treated as peripheral welfare activity. It has implications for labor-market participation, household income, gender equality and the sustainability of home-based care.
Different countries have used cash benefits, pension credits, respite, paid leave, training and formal recognition in different combinations. None can simply be imported into Argentina without considering fiscal conditions, labor-market structures and existing social protection.
The transferable principle is that caregiver capacity is finite.
Assessment processes can help make this visible by distinguishing what relatives are willing to do from what they are realistically able to sustain. A family member may willingly provide meals and companionship but be unable to perform transfers. Another may provide intensive care for several months but not indefinitely while remaining in employment.
Financing policy can then recognize the cost of maintaining viable home arrangements. In some cases, a modest amount of formal support may preserve a family's capacity to continue. In others, substantial formal care will be necessary regardless of family involvement.
The aim should not be to monetize every family relationship. It is to stop treating unpaid labor as though it were an unlimited free resource.
Governance must connect money with rights
Long-term care financing is ultimately a distribution of opportunities and risks. Funding decisions influence whether people can remain at home, whether relatives have realistic choices, whether workers can provide consistent care and whether residential services can maintain appropriate standards.
That makes financial governance inseparable from Argentina's rights framework for older people. The constitutional hierarchy granted to the Inter-American Convention on the Protection of the Human Rights of Older Persons strengthens the importance of dignity, autonomy, independence, participation and protection across public policy.
A rights-based financing perspective does not mean that every possible service can be funded without limit. Resources are finite in every country. It means that allocation rules, assessments and service design should be transparent, proportionate and capable of being examined against the rights and needs of the people affected.
Organizations exploring the maturity of these assurance arrangements can use the Governance Maturity Assessment to structure discussion about responsibility, evidence, escalation and oversight. Its organizational terminology must be adapted to local institutions, but the central principle is directly relevant: somebody must be able to explain how financial decisions translate into service availability, risk and outcomes.
From annual budgets to long-term stewardship
The greatest financing risk in an aging society is not necessarily spending too much in a particular year. It is allowing long-term obligations to develop without a coherent view of future capacity.
Care systems have path dependency. Once a country develops a predominantly institutional response to dependency, shifting toward community support can take years because buildings, workforce roles and payment systems reinforce the existing model. Conversely, expanding home-based care without developing workforce and quality infrastructure can create fragmented markets with unstable provision.
Long-term stewardship therefore requires decisions about the system Argentina wants to finance, not merely the expenditure it expects to inherit.
That means considering housing, accessible communities, prevention, primary healthcare, rehabilitation and technology alongside conventional long-term care services. Some investments sit outside the care budget but influence future demand. Accessible housing can make home support viable. Transport affects community participation. Digital connectivity can enable remote coordination while also creating exclusion if non-digital routes disappear.
The financing lens should consequently expand from service purchasing toward long-term system impact. The question becomes not only how much a program costs this year, but what pattern of dependency, capacity and household burden it helps create over the next decade.
What a more sustainable Argentine financing architecture could achieve
A stronger financing architecture would not necessarily look like a single fund. Its defining feature would be greater coherence between need, resources and outcomes.
People would have clearer information about what forms of support exist and the conditions under which they can be accessed. Governments and social-insurance institutions would have better visibility of the full continuum rather than only their own expenditure. Territorial planning would reveal where funding is not translating into viable capacity. Workforce costs would be treated as fundamental service infrastructure. Family caregiving would be visible within assessments of system sustainability.
Most importantly, financial decisions would increasingly be evaluated against outcomes. Did expenditure preserve independence? Did it reduce an avoidable transition into more intensive care? Did it provide a safe residential home when community care was no longer appropriate? Did it improve continuity? Did it protect a family from an unsustainable care burden?
Not every positive outcome produces a financial saving, and that distinction should remain explicit. Long-term care exists partly because societies choose to support dignity and quality of life even where expenditure cannot be recovered elsewhere. Sustainability is therefore not synonymous with minimizing cost.
It means creating a system capable of meeting legitimate needs over time without depending on hidden, unstable or inequitable forms of subsidy.
International learning should focus on financing principles
Countries with dedicated long-term care insurance can offer Argentina useful evidence about entitlement design, contribution mechanisms, assessment and cost control. Tax-funded systems can illustrate other approaches to universalism and local administration. Systems relying heavily on private purchasing demonstrate both the flexibility and the inequalities that can arise when household resources determine access.
None provides a ready-made answer.
The institutional conditions differ, and Argentina already has major structures such as PAMI that would shape any future reform. Its federal organization also means that financing reform must account for provincial and municipal roles rather than treating implementation as purely national.
The transferable principles are more durable than particular mechanisms: make entitlements understandable; recognize the true cost of care; measure unpaid as well as paid contribution; connect health and long-term support; avoid funding arrangements that reward unnecessary dependency; build workforce capacity alongside service expansion; monitor territorial inequality; and test future commitments against demographic and economic scenarios.
Argentina can adapt those principles without reproducing another country's institutions. The objective is a financing settlement that fits its own social protection, federal and economic context.
Conclusion
Argentina already finances a substantial long-term care system, but much of that financing is distributed across institutions and households rather than organized through one visible framework. PAMI funds important health and social benefits for its affiliates; national, provincial and municipal systems contribute other forms of support; private expenditure purchases additional care; and families provide a vast amount of unpaid assistance whose economic value is easily overlooked.
The central strategic challenge is to make that mixed economy more sustainable without confusing sustainability with simple expenditure restraint. Funding needs to support the forms of care Argentina wants to develop: earlier assistance where it can preserve function, viable home and community services, good residential provision where needed, a stable and competent workforce, meaningful support for families and stronger coordination with healthcare.
That requires better evidence about costs, need, workforce, geographic access and outcomes. It also requires governance capable of identifying when savings in one institution are creating costs elsewhere or when nominal funding is failing to produce real service capacity.
As demographic aging advances, Argentina's choices will increasingly determine whether long-term care costs are shared transparently or absorbed unevenly by households, workers and different levels of government. The strongest future model will not necessarily be the one with the simplest funding mechanism. It will be the one that connects resources with rights, makes hidden costs visible and finances a continuum capable of adapting as people's needs change.