Ongoing for more than twenty years, the debate on long-term care in Germany has focused heavily on the similarity between health risk and long-term care risk, leading to a solution in which the new long-term care insurance, set up in 1994, strongly resembles its predecessor, health insurance. That said, the differences revealed in its implementation show that the designers of long-term care insurance (despite their initial intention and despite the relative political consensus reached at the end of the debates) failed in their attempt to avoid the financial problems of health insurance. The principle of stable contributions has gradually been phased out. Unintended social consequences have also emerged, with German long-term care insurance becoming a source of inequality for carers, since these are primarily unregistered women with atypical statuses.