When Should You Consider Buying Long-Term Care Insurance?

Affordability is one of the key ingredients in any successful long-term care plan. Which is why the premium cost is often the most important elements to consumers who are considering the purchase of LTCI.  One of the most common questions I hear is: ” Will my premiums ever increase? ” The answer is this: there are lots of scenarios in which LTCI premiums could increase. I will try to expound one in this article and follow up with the second in a future article.  The first scenario involves a choice the policyholder makes regarding inflation protection. Most LTCI policies have automatic inflation protection built into the policy design from the beginning; in such cases the premium is designed to stay level for the life of the policyholder. The benefits increase each year, but the long term care insurance premium remains the same.

There are many opinions about long term care insurance which is actually based on anecdotal evidence. Every once in a year, the American Association for Long-Term Care Insurance publishes a LTCI Sourcebook that cuts through the fog of opinion by helping to establish the facts.  The 2009 version of this publication just became available and here are some of the new results of the data gathered from a large sampling of the leading continuous care insurers about those who have an individual long-term care insurance policy:

There are actually so many opinions about LTCI or long term care insurance which are mainly based on anecdotal evidence. Once a year, the American Association for Long-Term Care Insurance publishes a LTCI Sourcebook that cuts through the fog of opinion by helping to establish the facts. The 2009 version of this publication just became available and here are some of the results of the data gathered from a large sampling of the leading long-term care insurers about those who have an individual long-term care insurance policy:

On Monday, the New York Times ran a great story about Medicare Advantage Plans. Medicare Advantage Plans are a type of home health care plan sold by private insurance companies. These plans are actually associated with Medicare. It seems that seniors across the country have been duped into signing away their Medicare benefits by enrolling in a Medicare Advantage Plan. There are some cases when the seniors did not understand how the Medicare Advantage Plans worked, and in others, they didn’t even know that the insurance agents had signed them up for the plan. The insurance companies that sell these plans have been accused of several bad practices, including:

No one likes to pay insurance premiums of any kind and long term care insurance is no exception. The ony why we pay these premiums is because the alternative leaves our retirement income and investment assets exposed to high risk if long-term care becomes necessary and also we will have to pay for the care ourselves. It is no secret that the cost of health care facilities care can quickly drain your retirement funds and force a retiree into financial ruin. By purchasing long-term care insurance, a policyholder is accepting a small loss each year in the form of premiums paid. This small loss helps ensure that he or she will not be wiped out financially by unmanageable long-term care costs in the future.