audreyh1
Give me a museum and I'll fill it. (Picasso) Give me a forum ...
Yeah, it seemed to have zoomed right over the head of everyone so I just let it slide.
Maybe we just let it slide.
Last edited:
Yeah, it seemed to have zoomed right over the head of everyone so I just let it slide.
I think the worst part was when the insurance company acknowledged that he couldn't live safely on his own, but since he could still handle the six activities of daily living then he wasn't eligible for long-term care.
Appalling. This is the thing that ends up kicking people in the butt when they are 93 and alone. "You can still go the bathroom by yourself...no payments for you!"
Might better learn to lie and act helpless. But wait a minute...we'll be demented, right? Acting ability is a mental skill.
Amethyst
+1Maybe we just let it slide.
+1
It was a lame joke and this forum rarely acknowledges that sort of humor. Don't ask me how I know...
The worst part of the process has been the tracking burden. I had to wrestle monthly invoices out of the care facility, get them to John Hancock, wait a month for the paper check (which could get lost in the mail), and make sure it got deposited (again by mail). When I eventually got an iPad to read eBooks, I kicked myself for not starting mobile deposit earlier. Hancock finally shifted to electronic deposits but the paper invoices continued.
And then I discovered that nobody had even been tracking the total payments at Hancock. When Dad bought the policy in late 1992, it included 20 years of 5% inflation adjustments with a cap on the total payout. By conventional math (the kind I like to use) the 20th adjustment would have been in late 2012. Yet in late 2013 Hancock actually applied a 21st inflation adjustment to the payments. (In retrospect, they did not raise the cap by 5%.) The net effect was to make the policy reach its cap a little faster, but it proved to me that nobody at Hancock was watching the books. At one point my spouse and I had a discussion about whether Hancock would just keep paying right through the cap, and how much further would we let them go? We decided that we'd only return the money once they woke up and asked for it. Of course that was before they tried to stiff us for the last $6175 out of a $318K payout. They had no documentation to back up their numbers, and it looked as if they were just makin' stuff up.
It's hard to tell whether Hancock is truly that incompetent, or simply breathtakingly negligent, or merely evil.
I estimate that having an LTC policy would benefit our net worth about $200K if one of us is in LTC for a substantial amount of time. I calculated that by estimating we would have purchased a policy with a $300k payout max and we would have paid $100k (actual payments + forgone investment gains on the payment dollars we would have otherwise invested) for the policy. $300k max policy value - $100k policy cost = $200k higher net worth if LTC lasts at least to the max of the policy payout.
As things have worked out for us, would $200k likely mean the difference between the remaining spouse being impoverished or not? Almost certainly not.
Interesting - I'm seeing LTC ads on this page now. googleads is so smart.
Yes there are chances one or both spouses could linger in LTC for many years, but the odds are slim. And presently, the cost of insuring for that unlikely event of "many years of LTC" are not cheap, and with no assurance that it won't get even more pricey. As youbet points out, the cost of LTC care for most likely stays is maybe $200k-$300k, which should not impoverish a surviving spouse for most of the forum's posters (who have a NW of several hundred thousand dollars+). Obviously it won't hold for a majority of Americans who don't have large financial assets to pay for it, and who will need to rely on Medicaid or pay through the nose for some LTC insurance.
If the LTCI companies have such info and they are still trying to sell me insurance, I'd put that in the "good news" column.Maybe they know something about your future health outcomes that you don't even know yet! Scary...
You might be missing my point a bit.......
Today's LTC policies don't generally carry long periods of coverage or high payout limits. $300k is typical. And that policy probably costs you $100k by the time you use it. So the "help" amounts to $200k, no matter how long one spouse is in LTC.
With today's polices and the typical max payout limits, you're not buying catastrophic protection.
For us, it's not likely that a $200k insurance benefit is going to make a lot of difference in terms of the surviving spouse being impoverished or not. Everyone's situation is their own.
I'd even be okay with a two-year exclusion period and just 3 years of coverage. That would provide enough time for a couple to move assets and achieve Medicaid eligibility for the person needing care. In this case, the LTCI is like "Medigap" coverage with Medicaid becoming the "last resort" insurance that pays for a truly unusual event (a situation requiring more than 5 years of full-time NH care).Like many I suspect, I would love to buy a policy with a 2 year exclusion period and then much longer coverage. That would be true insurance to me and might be worth considering.
Typo? $2,600/year x 20 years = $52,000.... $2,600/year premium.
I asked him after the meeting what I was missing: let's assume she has 20 years before she enters LTC and thus has paid over $500K in premiums...
Typo? $2,600/year x 20 years = $52,000.
Da*n. I should not try and do Math in my head. But, to be fair, he didn't catch it, either.
+1And, even so, $52k to get $140k in coverage (not considering what that $52k would have earned and the fact that is paid over a period of years, but not considered inflation either) seems underwhelming to me). So the benefit is what $88k in extra benefit over just putting the $2600 a year in a CD each year. I'm not thinking that for most getting that $88k in benefits will really make or break anyone with any assets.
It just seems like too much cost for not enough benefit....
He gave a presentation on LTC with a real example (name blacked out, of course) of an insurance company quote.
56-year old female, coverage of $3,900/month, max 3 years of payments or $140K. 60-day waiting period, 3% annual COL increase. $2,600/year premium.