What You Need to Know About Long-Term Care
Forget gas prices, college costs, and cable bills. If you want an example of skyrocketing inflation, look no further than long-term care insurance premiums, which have jumped between 6% and 17% during the past year alone, reports Morningstar's Christine Benz. As insurance companies feel the pinch, existing policyholders have been confronted with the choice of swallowing higher premiums or accepting benefit cutbacks.
Forget gas prices, college costs, and cable bills. If you want an example of skyrocketing inflation, look no further than long-term care insurance premiums, which have jumped between 6% and 17% during the past year alone, reports Morningstar's Christine Benz. As insurance companies feel the pinch, existing policyholders have been confronted with the choice of swallowing higher premiums or accepting benefit cutbacks.
Given the current environment, many investors have decided to self-insure or depend on Medicare and Medicaid, which both have their own complications (Medicare only covers long-term care needs under a limited set of circumstances, and qualifying for Medicaid can be devilishly complicated).
In a series of popular articles in August, Morningstar's Chr istine Benz described why Medicare isn't much of a safety net for true long-term "custodial" care, explained what Medicaid will and won't provide, and discussed some practical takeaways. She also offered more than three dozen must-know statistics about long-term care to help investors frame their thinking, and she concluded the series with a set of top tips for self-insurers.
In the next post I will try to paste in the specifics from the Benz articles.
Michael
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