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July 31, 2014 at 04:00 AM
Earlier this week, executives of insurers that sell long-term care insurance (LTCI) talked about ongoing problems with interest rates and claims.
The trustees of the Medicare trust funds said the Medicare hospitalization fund might have some cash in it until 2030. That’s up from 2026. After 2030, if Medicare had to rely entirely on current revenue to pay benefits, it could pay only 85 percent of the anticipated benefits.
The trustees of the trust fund backing the Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) program said that fund is likely to go broke in late 2016 — just in time for the 2016 general elections. The trustees for that fund gave roughly the same estimated depletion date in 2012 and 2013.
Some commenters who, realistically, may well be actuaries or regulators who have vast volumes of statistics at their command, argue (even below some of the articles that run on LifeHealthPro.com) that insurers have had a hard time starting the private stand-alone LTCI market and may never quite get the products right.
Of course, National Underwriter — one of the publications affiliated with LifeHealthPro.com — ran articles for decades about the horrors of the European social insurance programs, and also about how extremely difficult writing medical insurance would be. In one sense, those columnists were right: Insurers really haven’t gotten major medical insurance quite right, after more than a century of trying. But you could argue that it’s done some good. Many people buy it.
