"Hard working pensioners"

I sometimes use this oxymoron as a joke, but over at The Daily Express they actually expect to be taken seriously:
The phrase is sadly lacking from the online version of the story:

UP to 100,000 pensioners have been forced to sell their homes to pay for ­medical care that should have been free.

Huge numbers of senior ­citizens in nursing homes had been entitled to have their bills met by the NHS. But because of blunders by ­officials they missed out and were forced to quit properties they had worked a lifetime to buy (1) in order to cover costs.

1) That's a huge great lie, isn't it? It's fair to assume that most people who are now pensioners bought their houses when they were still cheap and paid off the bulk of their mortgage within ten years or so, once you take inflation into account.

I know for a fact that my parents took on what seemed to be a normal sized mortgage in the 1960s and inflation eroded the principal so such an extent that they could pay it off out of petty cash sometime in the 1970s; they've lived rent free ever since.

In fact, I was one of the lucky people who bought in the mid 1990s and I paid off my mortgage in eleven years (Halifax couldn't do ten years, for some reason), the monthly payments were rather less than what it would have cost to rent.

Also begs the question, why do you need a house if you live in a care home, but hey. (On the substantive issue, I'm a great believer in universal, non-means tested benefits, i.e. I'm perfectly happy if some of my/our tax money is used to pay for a basic minimum standard of care for old and dying people, as I too one day will be old and dying.)