Taking a Look at Long-Term Care Insurance

Current numbers show substantial growth from the eighties, and estimates suggest that the demand for long term care among the elderly will more than double in the next thirty years. (Feder, Komisar, and Niefeld) This growth will exacerbate concerns about balancing institutional and noninstitutional care, assuring quality of care, and most importantly adopting and sustaining financing mechanisms that equitably and adequately protect the elderly who need long-term care.

According to Edlund et al., (2003), the Long-Term Care Security Act signed in 2000 by President Clinton established the Federal Long-Term Care Insurance Program, which in 2002 offered a long-term care insurance program to federal government employees, retirees, and their family members. This type of long-term care employer assisted insurance has great appeal as the last of the Baby Boomers have entered their early fifties. In “Ready, Set, Grow,” Paul Barr (2014) stated that there are 10,000, Baby Boomers per day becoming eligible for Medicare, and those in their sixties focus on cost saving solutions; whereas Baby Boomers in their fifties emphasize the importance of quality, and ease of access while exploring new care models with innovative patient interactions and unique financing

So why isn’t insurance for those sixty-five and older the biggest payer of long-term care? This contradiction to what you would think is a result of the restrictions put on long-term care by both types of insurance. Medicaid only sets the restriction that the person must be over twenty-one, have a medical need (verified by a doctor) for help with their daily living, and the care be given in a Medicaid certified facility. If these requirements are met Medicaid will cover nursing facilities, home health, and some day care facilities. However, each state set their own services so the Medicaid eligible services may be different from state to state (Meedicaid.gov, n.d). Medicare on the other hand does not cover long-term care that helps with the functioning of everyday life. Medicare only covers subacute care weather in your home or a facility. With the requirements being that the facility must be at a Medicare licensed facility, the patient has to be transferred from an acute hospital, the transfer must be prescribed by a doctor, and or the patient must have been released from a hospital stay within the last sixty days (CMS, 2014). Medicaid pays for long-term care users who have difficulty living everyday life, performing everyday activities, and have a lifelong medical disorder needing assistance to function at just about any age. While, Medicare pays for

Long-term care is vital in the United States health care system. As the population ages, more people will need assistance to recover from illness or injury, and others will need end of life care to ease their passing. People who use long-term care are all ages. From young to old, people can receive it if they cannot care for themselves because of a condition, an illness, or an injury that requires assistance for a period of 90 days or more. The concern people face when looking at long-term care is the funding. Medicaid will likely be drained of funds long before the country’s aging population is past its peak and while there are some options of insurance coverage, not everyone may afford them.

If you are unfamiliar with long term care insurance, now is a good time to discover some of the benefits. Long term care insurance can help cover the cost of a nursing home, an assisted living facility, or in-home care when, or if the time comes that you need it. Yes, Medicaid will cover some long-term care expenses, but it does not cover all of them and will only provide benefits if your net worth is low enough to qualify. Long term care insurance can be quite costly however - and the longer you delay in purchasing a policy, the higher the annual premium will become. What Will Long Term Care Insurance Pay For? Different policies provide different benefits. Some policies pay a daily benefit, such as $200 or $300 per day, that can be used

Imagine that you are a patient in an hospital in Ontario - you have undergone acute care and are now ready to enter a Long-term care (LTC) facility for additional care. Now imagine that you have entered a complex maze, like the Waterloo County County Corn Maze, only much trickier. Why?

Long-term care has and is continuing to become an important part of the continuum of care. Years ago Long-term care (LTC) was considered only to be for the elderly, but as time passes it is for anybody and everybody who needs it. Barton (2006) stated, “Regardless of the length of time (i.e., from weeks to years), long-term care is an array of services provided in a range of settings to individuals who have lost some capacity for independence due to injury, chronic illness, or condition” (p. 367). According to Barton (2006), it states that the services long-term care provides help the consumer with basic needs and shows the individuals how to do daily living activities, along with therapy and being able to

Another important aspect is long-term care in the Unites States. Some long-term care facilities in the United States are considered either private or state owned. The state-owned facilities need to improve the quality of care. Due to people living longer have put a large demand on long-term facilities. A lot of state owned facilities are unstaffed and over pullulated. Americans should have access to universal healthcare coverage and log-term coverage care from a quality long-term facility.

There have been two main drivers to the factors that have influenced long-term care. The first driver is the exponential increase in medicine and pharmacology. This has allowed more people to live longer by not suffering an annual winter disease decimation of their numbers and enabled them to live longer with chronic diseases. The second driver is federal funding either directly via reimbursement for services or indirectly via pension payments as well as direct funding for construction. These all create demand for facilities and services. More than any other factors it was both the proprietary construction funding of 1959 and OBRA that have structured the current long-term care environment.

It is still a barrier for those that can afford the insurance and those that cannot.

Will mom or loved one receive better care at home or in a nursing home? This is a hard choice to make, but which is the best? In this paper, it examines the efficiency of home care programs, assisted living and long-term care programs. It examines the care and cost of the different programs with respect. The decision of whether or not to place an aging parent (or a loved one) into a long-term care facility, or to try and to keep them in their own home or yours is one that many American families are facing each day. Factors in dealing with this decision are too numerous to count, but we will address a few of them in the following paper, like the

The long-term healthcare system has an infrastructure that is unfriendly and difficulty to navigate. With a growing number of frail older people living in the United States, the pressure to find a more affordable way to care for them will mount. Nearly 12 million people need some form of long-term care (LTC) and half are over age 65 (Wilber, 2014, Class Session 2). As mentioned in the article “Waiting in the Dark with Dad,” a large percentage of American healthcare costs fund medical procedures and medications to keep terminally ill people 65 and older alive (Lopez, 2014, p. 1). Steve Lopez experienced this with his 85-year-old father, Tony, who lived in a nursing home that was a place meant to keep his heart beating, but not actually improve his health and well-being. This is the harsh reality of the long-term care industry that many have faced, including experts in the field such as Dr. Robert Kane, author of It Shouldn’t Be This Way: The Failure of Long-Term Care. Long-term services and supports (LTSS) are supposed to maximize the quality of care and the quality of life for the individual (Kane and West, 2005, p. 169). When that focus is lost, it is the responsibility of healthcare professionals, like myself, to bring that issue back to the forefront of policy making.

(Pratt)(2016), “The components of accessibility to long- term care services depend on financial coverage, physical logistics, location, and the degree of complexity of consumer’s needs.” (P62)The role of illness prevention in long-term care is to help the patient live healthier with less hospitalizations, diseases, and treatments. Some incentives that might encourage consumers to use the long-term care system more effectively and efficiently are financial in nature. They could receive tax deductions, credits or both.

The federal government needs to evaluate different types of long-term facilities to determine which one is the most effective and can provide assistance to the majority of older individuals in need of long term care. Once the optimal long-term care facility is determine, the government can invest to help the industry grow to satisfy the need of the aging population. Medicare’s future coverage of long-term services will help the economy by recovering those lost wages from the informal care and will create more health care jobs, all while providing support to older

The aging baby boomers are quickly approaching retirement age and the issue of long term care after retirement becomes a problem that everyone has to face. With the baby boomer there is an increase in their wealth because their working longer. In the 1930’s there were a lot of illnesses and diseases that were not cured as of yet as they are now and the average life expectancy was only 58 for men and 62 for women. Heart disease was one of the major diseases that were a killer of people in the 1930’s and during this time penicillin had just emerged to heal the sick, but of course this would not help in the battle of heart disease. The advances in health care today are stronger than ever before and with more screening services and with