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October 02, 2013 at 09:31 AM
I was going to write about ideas for making the idea of nursing home care chic, but then I watched a panel discussion on the “old old” organized by Altarum.
The panelists seemed generally to agree with the idea that encouraging more people to use private insurance to protect themselves against long-term care (LTC) needs is silly, because people are strapped for cash already and have other things they need to do with their money, and private long-term care insurance (LTCI) arrangements lock both the issuers and the consumers in a complicated relationship that could last 20 or 30 years or more.
I am passionately biased toward liking the people who sell, issue and administer private LTCI. In my experience, they’re great people who are doing all they can to help educate people about an important challenge and offer them tools for managing that risk.
I have no strong official opinion about whether any particular strategy is better for managing LTC risk than any other. I don’t have any strong opinions about whether space aliens will eat us all in the next 30 years, either. You never know.
And, of course, the doctors, counselors, caseworkers, LTC facility staffers and others who work directly with older people and their caregivers have a different perspective on all of this than the people in the LTCI community.
The people in the LTC community may hear about LTCI only when something has gone wrong with the LTCI. They don’t see the LTCI people struggling heroically behind the scenes to keep the LTCI policies working as well as possible, under difficult circumstances in which ultra-low interest rates are suffocating all efforts to insure insureds against long-term risks.
But what really troubled me was the idea that it’s unrealistic to expect the kinds of solvent workers who can afford car insurance, home insurance and some life insurance to put any effort into preparing for LTC bills that could roll 20 or 30 years from now.
The Egyptian pharaohs built pyramids that still provide funerary care services for the souls of the people buried therein.
The ancient Romans built aqueducts that are still providing transportation care services for drinking water.
If the Egyptians could arrange for tomb care for at least some people for millennia, and the Romans could arrange for water care for at least some water for millennia, why do we have so much trouble with the concept of planning for someone to help us eat 30 years from now?
