It’s not a popular topic of conversation, but we are getting older each minute and many of us will need some additional care during our senior years.
According to the Underwriter’s Long Term Care Council, your chance of being involved in an auto accident is 1 in 240. Your chance of having a house fire is 1 in 1200. Your chance for requiring long term care is 1 in 2. That pretty much says it all, doesn’t it?
As you can imagine, long term care is not cheap. According to the latest survey by one of the most comprehensive and respected surveys in the industry, in 2004 the average annual cost for a semiprivate room in a nursing home is $61,685 and $70,080 for a private room. Those costs translate to an average of $169 per day for a semiprivate room and $192 per day for a private room. These numbers will continue to rise. According to the Cost of Care Survey,
The cost of nursing home care in Portland, the most expensive city in Oregon for this type of care, has increased 32 percent since 2004, according to an annual Cost of Care Survey released today
We can’t depend on Medicare; the odds are good that it will pay only a fraction of nursing home costs you incur. At most, it will help cover the costs for the first 100 days of skilled care. Before we become eligible for Medicaid, we may need to use up most of our own assets.
Most of us would rather deny we will need long-term care, but denial is not the answer. Securing long term care insurance is the best thing we can do to ease our minds and conserve our life savings. Furthermore, it’s a good idea to obtain a policy early (you can get a policy as young as age 18) because the annual premium payments are lower and it’s easier to qualify for a policy.
Long term care insurance can pay the cost should you need to spend some time in a nursing home. But possibly the most important benefit of long term care insurance is that it may keep you out of a nursing home.
That’s right. A good long term care policy not only pays the cost of a nursing home. It covers the cost of other care, including nursing services, home health care, hospice, licensed therapy, adult day care and homemaker services.
These services can provide someone to make meals and do laundry; they can provide assistance with bathing, dressing and other daily personal care needs; they can provide physical therapy at home, and more.
By covering the cost of other services, long term care insurance can eliminate or, at the very least, postpone the need for nursing home care.
You may also be able to use the benefits provided by a long term care policy more than once. Let’s say you broke a bone, which required a short nursing home stay or eight weeks of in-home physical therapy. Once you have satisfied the elimination period, your long term care policy would pay the cost of that short-term care, as well as care you may need in the future.
Long term care insurance can help ease our minds, but it is important to understand not all long term care policies are alike.
Some cover the cost of only nursing home care and others cover both nursing home and in-home care. Some offer tax-free benefits, while others provide premium discounts if policies are purchased for both a husband and wife. The better policies offer all of these options and more.
When looking for a long term care policy, it’s important to do business with a financially-secure organization. To find a policy that is right for you, it’s important to consider all the options, such as deductible period, daily benefits, maximum lifetime benefit and inflation protection.
Don’t wait until you need care and wish you had insurance to cover the cost.
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