Long-term care insurance is widely sought by people who hope to
extend their life expectancy and shoulder more of the living expenses that
they might need during retirement.

As most of us know, long-term care insurance involves care normally
not covered by health insurance, like Medicare (a government-funded medical
care assistance program), or Medicaid (the public health care program for
low-income Americans).

Any disabling or recurring illness or sickness that would require
regular supervision or nursing care necessitates long-term care services
though long-term care isn't necessarily long term. A person may need care
for only a few months to recover from surgery or illness.

Long-term care isn't just limited to home-based nursing care and
patients who require long-term care are generally not sick in the
traditional sense. Instead, long-term care can likewise involve assistance
with day-to-day events like getting out of bed, bathing/cleaning, taking
medications, putting on clothes and eating.

Long-term care would scope various services like:

1. Non-institutional care
a. Hospice care - treatment and care, either at home or in a
hospice care facility, for patients who are dying and only have six months
left to live or less.
b. Respite care - intended to give overburdened family members a
break or a vacation from their care-giving tasks
c. Long-term home health care - any other form of home-based
services for patients with a debilitating yet non-fatal injury or
disability
d. Adult day care - involves supervision of elderly patients when
family members are away from home, during the better part of the day
e. Personal care - assistance with health-related tasks,
nutritional or support functions, dressing or feeding or personal hygiene
f. Home health care - services performed in a patient's residence;
can also comprise skilled home health aide services, occupational or
physical or speech therapy or nursing care.

2. Institutional care, like nursing facilities, etc. - also known as
nursing homes.

Americans who have permanent disabilities and who are older than age
65, can have a portion of their costs of hospitalization subsidized by
Medicare. Unfortunately, Medicare will not pay for the costs of long-term
care, but Medicaid will for those who don't have the money to pay for it.

Remember though, that whatever help Medicare can offer is quite
limited. It can only pay for about three months of medical care from a
skilled nursing facility, or hospitalization. Afterwards, it would entail
considerable co-payments (i.e. people would now have to shoulder the rest
of the costs.)

An official for the Carson Wealth Management Group of Omaha said
Americans can't always look to the government to foot the bill. To
illustrate her point, the official cited a few examples of rising costs in
health care for retirees, like $70-thousand annually for a private room in
a nursing home in Nebraska (i.e. roughly about $190 daily). That's why
it's good sense to be able to get some involvement from the insurance
company when it comes to long-term care expenses.

Americans with few assets and really small incomes can use Medicaid -
despite its limited choices of facilities - for health and long-term care.
For example, Medicaid can pay for some degree of benefits for home health
care but not for an assisted living facility. Likewise, aside from the
very long waiting lists, Medicaid has very stringent financial eligibility
criteria and generally requires beneficiaries to use up most or all of
their savings before it releases any dole-outs for services which are
generally given, based on the individual's ability to pay.

Evidently, long-term care insurance does not come cheap. Compared
with contemporary medical care (e.g. rehabilitation or correction of some
medical conditions), the goal of long-term care is to enable individuals
with recurring illnesses overcome their limitations on their ability to
function independently. Long-term care involves a wide variety of services
and, generally, older people often need more care than they anticipate.

In contrast, long-term care insurance provides more mileage, namely
for:

1. Assisted living facilities
2. Adult day care centers
3. Extended care at home
4. Nursing home care

Long-term care insurance is becoming an alluring form of security for
many Americans, even if it is not for everyone. A specialist in long-term
care insurance said many Americans, who are driven by the desire to acquire
a wider range of care choices and to safeguard their investments and nest
egg, choose to enroll themselves in long-term care coverage plans.
Long-term care insurance, depending on the policy terms, offers a financial
buffer to pay for future home health care and community-based services, and
nursing home stays. Current estimates place the number of Americans who
have long-term care coverage at seven million.

Long-term care insurance provisions and rates may vary, largely in
part because of a policyholder's age.



For example:

Benefit amounts like $200 a day might be incorporated in the pricing
factors.
A 66-year-old might pay more than $5,000 in premiums compared to a
55-year-old who might just pay $3,000 a year
Some policy benefits are released at about 40 days after a triggering
event. Other policies start at 90 days. Some coverage bestows
enough funds to cover three years of care. Others are meant to cover
a whole lifetime, ten years or just six years.

The release of benefits are normally triggered, in the event that:

1. A person has lost the ability to do two primary day-to-day tasks like
bathing or dressing
and
2. A person is reasonably stricken with any form of dementia or a
condition like Alzheimer's

Usually, there are no set rules for when individuals should think
about buying long-term health insurance, but people with sufficient savings
or earnings should ideally consider getting coverage. Often, Americans
only start thinking about getting insurance when they're already in the 40s
age bracket.

Incidentally, as people grow older, the risk of having long-term care
coverage rises. It may be interesting to note, however, that age is not a
main factor in the necessity for long-term care.

* Cases in point:

Forty percent of long-term care patients are those in between the
ages of 18 to 64. (The late actor Christopher Reeve required 9 years
of long-term care when at age 42, following an equestrian accident in
1995, he became paralyzed.) Long-term care coverage may no longer be
available in the event a health condition hits a patient.
Early occurrences (prior to age 65) of conditions like Parkinson's
and Alzheimer's are rare but they do happen. (Michael J. Fox was
diagnosed with Parkinson's when he was just 30.)


Analysts say that the average American who earns $20,000 and has
$300,000 to $400,000 in savings, is seriously at risk "without long-term
care coverage." They said that only people who have few assets and low
income are the ones who probably can do without long-term care coverage
since Medicaid's there to shoulder their nursing home care.