I've done a deep dive on this over the past three years or so. I've found two things: most information does not take into account what your aim in getting the policy is; and generally no one seems to talk about reimbursement vs. indemnity. These things made a big difference to me, so I'll discuss a little about them in case it helps.
A lot of information you find online talks about "the average cost of care." What sort of care? Some people only think about this as nursing home care, and they get LTC insurance to preserve something for their children. I have no children, and my aim with LTC insurance is to avoid a nursing home at all costs. I want home care.
Quick information online will burble about how home care is cheaper. In fact, home care is only cheaper if you need a certain number of hours of care per day. If you need 24-hour care? Let's say you have to have someone sleep over in case you need to get to the bathroom. 24-hour care at home is way, way more expensive than a nursing home.
I already have two policies, from two different insurers, that taken together would cover me for $340, or about 14 hours a day. The remaining 10 hours is on me. Would I need a registered nurse, an experienced health-care person, or "just anybody" who might help, say, with washing and dressing and such? Prices differ sharply and could add up to $100,000-150,000 or even more a year just to fill that donut hole.
So I've been looking into a third policy. The two I've already got have an inflation rider, which is good; they're not fully valid outside the US, which is bad; and they're both reimbursement-only, which is also bad. Reimbursement means you have to hire a health worker they approve of, and that worker has to submit their hours and be reimbursed. An indemnity policy just gives you the money, and you decide whom to hire and how it gets spent.
The last issue for me is price hikes. I hate them. So when I bought my current policies I got "ten pays." These are no longer offered, but the idea was to pay a ridiculous amount of money each year for 10 years, and then your policy is fully paid up forever. In looking for a third policy, I've gone to the hybrids. These can be paid up in one giant payment -- i.e., write the company a check for, say, $100,000, murmur the incantation "Please don't go out of business" and never pay anything again.
There's a great range of hybrids of various sorts. There are hybrids that will give you your money back if you decide you're not going to use the policy after all. (You will, of course, have lost the investment use of that money for whatever period of time you had the policy in force.) Some hybrids are good anywhere in the world, some aren't. There are LTC/life insurance hybrids, and there are other sorts with other pros and cons. I've told the agents at Nationwide and NY Life (the two companies I'm most interested in) that I'm only open to an indemnity policy.
This is all worth it to me for peace of mind. I understand those who prefer to self-insure. One last thing to consider, and this is relevant to self-insuring: LTC policies are triggered by clearly defined milestones. You must be unable to perform two or three acts of daily living (washing, eating, dressing, transferring). But what about the ordinary needs of getting older? What if you need, say, a part-time helper to drive you and to do a few chores you can't quite manage any more? Will LTC cover that? No, it will not, and that's when you may be grateful you focused on self-insuring.