LifePlans: Jobs may help LTCI applicants

December 14, 2012 at 08:45 AM
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The consumers who applied for private long-term care insurance (LTCI) and get it may be much more likely to have jobs than the rejected applicants are.

Denise Liston, a vice president at LifePlans, presented data supporting that argument in a presentation she gave at a recent session at the AALTCI Summit — an LTCI industry conference organized by the American Association for Long-Term Care Insurance.

AALTCI is selling access to session recordings and offering free access to snippets of the recordings.

LifePlans conducted an analysis of about 55,000 consumers who applied for private LTCI coverage from January 2009 through June 2010 and failed to get it.

When LifePlans compared the new LTCI buyers with the declines, it found, as it expected, that the new buyer buyers were younger than the declines, Liston said.

The median age of the new buyers was 57, compared with a median age of 64 for the declines.

The ratio of men to women was the same for the new buyers and for the declines.

The ratio of married applicants to single applicants was also the same.

But LifePlans found a big, obvious difference in the ratio of employed people to people who were not employed.

About 71 percent of the new buyers had jobs, compared with just 51 percent of the declines, Liston reported.

But Liston noted that more research is needed, and that analyze LTCI underwriting data is challenging.

"No two companies reported data in the same way," Liston said.

Also at the AALTCI conference:

- Ross Bagshaw, an actuary and LTCI industry executive, gave a talk on LTCI prices. "Rates are increasing," he said. "They're increasing fast." In the list of answers to mock multiple-choice test question, he suggested that an "optimistic long-term care actuary" might be "a mythical creature like the Yeti," or "a thing of the past."

- Tom Riekse Jr. of LTCI Partners talked about the kinds of tradeoffs consumers may have to make as a result of the recent waves of increases in LTCI policy prices. "Clients may need to look at a lower inflation protection level in the short-term, maybe a higher level in the medium-term range, and kind of a medium level of inflation protection in the long-term," Riekse said.

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