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October 26, 2012 at 02:59 PM
Have you ever had one of those breakthroughs when it dawns on you that there’s an entire world going about its day just beyond your perception?
Idly daydreaming, perhaps your thoughts wander to the microscopic ecosystem which ekes out a living too small for the naked eye… or you remember that 3/4th of the Earth’s surface is covered in deep blue ocean, a larger world within our own of which we pay no attention.
So it is with LTSS and LTC, two worlds which co-exist practically in the same space and dimension…and yet their participants go about their daily lives oblivious to one another. To learn how this came to be, we must re-visit the past.
First came the nursing homes
This service modality cornered the market throughout the 1970s; therefore, marketers felt no pressure to either “frame” the term or substitute euphemisms. As the connotation of “nursing home” eroded throughout the 1980’s, “nursing facility” emerged as more palatable, until “assisted living” exploded from out of nowhere in the 1990s, unleashing a full-fledged thesaurus of new vocabulary.
By this point, agents couldn’t give away “nursing facility” insurance for free, but found consumers willing to discuss “long-term care.” What’s more, responses to the terms “assisted living” or “home care” went through the roof compared to other alternatives—agents and carriers learned caution in word choice. Potential prospects tended to picture themselves in certain care settings—if at all—and responded to ads accordingly.
Fast forward to today—even the words “long-term care (LTC) have acquired some of the rust and corrosion previously associated with “nursing home insurance.”
Eager to shed hoary perceptions, the industry shuffles its options like a teenager trying on outfits: will “extended care” or “long-term healthcare” take over soon? Or will it be something else?
