Public coverage of Long-Term Care in the post-COVID period: strengthening systems vs cost-containment

In the first part of this paper we discuss how 19 countries’ LTC systems cover people for the risk of needing LTC using the three questions posed by the WHO Universal Coverage framework (people, services and costs). We do not aim to describe all the policies in detail or provide quantitative estimates of the extent of coverage (see (Llena-Nozal et al., 2025), instead we focus on policy decisions that determine the extent and depth of coverage of public LTC systems. Second, we explore whether these countries have adopted policies that expand the coverage of the LTC system, or if, instead, they have adopted cost-containment policies. We use a framework that identifies cost-containment demand and supply side policies (Gori & Luppi, 2024). We do not attribute the policy changes to the COVID pandemic but rather consider this as a period from when changes may have been expected.