LTCI Watch: The Bus Is Here!

The 3in4 Association’s bus is returning to New York’s Times Square this week, just across the Hudson River from me, and, seriously: I think the bus is working at generating enthusiasm.

At least, it’s making me feel enthusiastic.

No one is paying me to feel a hokey sense of pleasure at the idea of a long-term care (LTC) planning bus coming back into my area.

If anything, my editors would prefer to avoid letting me overdose on the cheese factor. 

But there’s just something really appealing about the idea of an LTC expert named Dr. Marion (Marion Somers) driving a vintage bus across the country to promote an idea that’s obviously a great idea.

I don’t know if any particular long-term care insurance (LTCI) product is a good product. I don’t really, truly know whether LTCI products in general will work the way people expect them to work. I don’t feel as if I have any sense of certainty about whether civilization will exist in the current form a year from now, let alone the idea that holding onto a dollar bill for a year makes sense. If I don’t quite completely trust a dollar bill to hold its purchasing power for more than few months, it’s hard for me to be any more confident about anything other than the vague idea that having more money might turn out to be better than having less money. If nothing else, if the money is paper money, paper is a good insulator and makes good kindling. Just keep it dry and it can help keep you warm.

But, regardless: Clearly, everybody is going to get old, plenty of us will need help in our later years, and thinking about LTCI products and other LTC financing options is certainly a great idea. Adam Smith could support that idea. Benjamin Franklin would certainly support that idea. Maybe Karl Marx would support that idea, even if he might have a somewhat (OK, very) different take than Smith or Franklin about how LTC financing ought to work.