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December 05, 2014 at 10:20 AM
The federal government has just confirmed that spending on noncommercial medical research really did fall in 2013, to $46.7 billion.
That’s down 2.6 percent from the total in 2012, and it’s at the lowest level since 2009. Spending was down 5.3 percent from a peak of $49.3 billion recorded in 2011. Spending on every other category of health care expenses increased.
Meanwhile, the experts are telling Congress that, if nothing in medical science changes, dementia alone is likely to cost the United States more than $20 trillion over the next 40 years — within the time that some of your youngest clients will still be paying the premiums on life insurance policies and long-term care insurance (LTCI) policies that you first sold them this year.
Of course, it’s fashionable to say that advances in medical science simply increase costs, by helping drug companies charge patients more for care, and that all we need to cut costs is for people to eat better and exercise more
Clearly, especially for the people in the long-term care (LTC) planning community, that’s a bunch of hooey.
You sell products and services every day to people who eat right, exercise and are conscientious enough to do what they can to plan for post-retirement health care needs. But some of them still need care for years, or decades. Many because of the ravages of conditions such as Alzheimer’s disease, other forms of dementia, Parkinson’s disease and multiple sclerosis that seem to have some poorly understood connection with the immune system genetics and attacks by microbes.
