Short-term care insurance gets its own regulator panel

Members of the Senior Issues Task Force are continuing their efforts to prepare states’ insurance laws and regulations for the aging of the baby boomers.

The task force, part of the Health Insurance and Managed Care Committee at the Kansas City, Missouri-based National Association of Insurance Commissioners, has created two new regulatory panels.

One is a Short-Term Health Policies Providing Long-Term Care Benefits Subgroup. That subgroup will look at short-term care insurance policies, or policies that cover skilled nursing care, rehabilitation facility care, home health care or other forms of non-acute health care for relatively short periods of time.

Related: New nursing home regs could help LTCI users

The task force has also created a Long-Term Care Benefit Adjustment Subgroup. That subgroup will look at situations in which long-term care insurance issuers give policyholders a choice between paying higher rates for the same benefits or paying lower rates for a lower level of benefits.

That subgroup will look at how to analyze the value of long-term care insurance benefits adjustment options and what insurers should tell the long-term care insurance policyholders about benefits adjustment offers.

The NAIC is a group for state insurance regulators. States can choose whether to use the model laws and regulations it develops as the basis for their own laws and regulations. In some cases, states adopt NAIC models as is. In other cases, few states adopt NAIC models.

The formation of a subgroup does not necessarily mean the NAIC will develop a model in a particular area, but it may increase the odds that the NAIC will at least talk about creating a model law, a model regulation, or some other type of model, such as a model bulletin, or a model instruction manual section for insurance company examiners.