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Genworth is making its first effort to write significant amounts of individual long-term care insurance since early 2016.
The Richmond, Virginia-based company's CareScout Insurance Company subsidiary is starting to sell a new CareScout Care Assurance LTCI policy through distributors in 35 states.
The policy will be available to consumers ages 45 through 65 and offer $50,000 to $250,000 in total LTC benefits.
The product is available with annual compound inflation protection options that can increase coverage by up to 1%, 3% or 5% per year.
Insureds will get access to Genworth's new LTC provider network.
CareScout is emphasizing that it's a stand-alone company, with no ties to other Genworth companies that write or have written insurance, and that the new policies will be backed by reinsurance from a strong reinsurer. The reinsurer has not yet been named.
"The reinsurer will not have direct obligations to policyholders under the agreement, and the reinsurance may be modified or terminated in the future," CareScout noted in the product launch announcement.
What it means: The market for stand-alone LTCI policies and other LTC funding products may be continuing to recover from hard times.
A healthy LTCI market could provide clients with a strategy for maximizing the amount of care available per dollar allocated toward LTC planning.
The history: Genworth helped create the modern U.S. LTCI market.
Genworth and many of its competitors started with incorrect assumptions about how enthusiastic customers would be about keeping their policies, how much they would use their coverage and what would happen to yields on the bond portfolios and other assets supporting the benefits.
Most of the original LTCI issuers eventually suspended new coverage sales and began imposing waves of big premium increases in an effort to help their blocks of in-force LTCI policies break even.
Genworth has said that it has no intention of adding capital to the subsidiaries that wrote the old LTCI policies and that those subsidiaries must use their existing assets and premium flows, and any additional premiums arriving as a result of rate increases, to pay their benefits.
The future: CareScout will start with the hard-won LTCI knowledge that Genworth accumulated and with a much more conservative approach to benefits design and pricing, according to Genworth executives.
Lynn White, the CEO of CareScout, said CareScout wants to offer consumers choices.
"The product was designed to be simple and flexible, and to support the needs of policyholders and their families," White said.
Credit: jovannig/AdobeStock
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