It was when the care home manager started to talk about staff training that the alarm bells sounded for me. Not because I didn’t want the people who would be caring for my mother to be well trained – far from it. It was his reasons for ensuring all his staff had a certificate to their name that I found so worrying. “It’s a competitive business,” he told my brother and me. “Our people have to have those qualifications. That’s what other places have and we can’t afford to fall behind.”

I found his unashamed concern for his bottom line shocking. But I could also see why he was so keen to bring the business in. At some £550 a week for a place in an establishment like his – although he was prepared to haggle to get us to sign on the dotted line – there are serious amounts of cash at play.

Not surprisingly, we didn’t go for the care home in question, plumping instead for an even more expensive option where we felt happier with the atmosphere and the care on offer. But my experience of choosing a care home, which came just before Andrew Dilnot released his recommendations on paying for care, showed me that money talks – even when it should be the standard of care that we should really be concerned about.

When his report was published, Dilnot rightly pointed out that the issue of funding adult social care had been ignored for too long. He proposed that the costs an individual has to pay for his or her care should be capped at £35,000. Many have agreed, arguing that it’s unfair that people who’ve saved all their lives, or worked hard to pay for a home, should be forced to lose most of what they had hoped to pass on to their families.

But for me, it’s not inheritance rights that matter. It’s simply that as things stand, where so many people self-fund their care, we’ve created a market that has spiralled out of control. While the state has stood by, determining that only the worst-off will have their costs made for, care for the elderly has become essentially a private matter.

It’s a world in which staff costs are pushed down so hard that frankly it’s no surprise quality can be so poor. One in which the push for growth can become so all-consuming that, as with Southern Cross, it leads to failure. And one where the prices are so sky high that care home managers seem to believe that relatives will want to haggle over prices rather than talk about how they maintain their elderly residents’ dignity and quality of life.

Establishing a system such as Dilnot recommends, in which people knew how much they would have to pay for their care in later life, would not just allow families to plan for their old age. It would also allow us to concentrate on the things that really matter: good quality care, with respect for the individual.

Care for those who need it should not be about having to worry about the invoice at the end of the month.