As someone who has begun looking into private insurance options for long-term care, I appreciate the import of the article on long-term care issues featured on the National Center for Policy Analysis web site this morning. Two items bring this home very pointedly: until my mom passed away recently, my three siblings and I were going through the extended scenario of care at home for her, at a significant cost and rate of depletion of her assets. I have just one child in my family, which makes the point for me even more pointed, if you will.
The current long-term care system administered by government requires (legal) impoverishment of an elderly person in order to make them eligible for medicaid. Naturally, many many families follow the appropriate incentives in this regard, eventually placing their parents in the care of the state. Private-pay at-home care is cheaper than nursing home care, to be sure, but very costly nonetheless. Children who are both close enough in proximity to ageing parents, and able to personally devote the time and resources required for 24-hour care, are very much strained in attempting to do so. Even auxiliary support for a full-time paid caregiver, as I and many many families have seen, requires significant managerial time; bills, taxes, banking, appointments, household and medical supplies, residential upkeep, legal and medical consultations and all the rest are unchanged when the primary resident becomes incapable of handling them. Those functions are a huge burden in themselves–ones that are usually not shopped out to non-family members.
As I see it, the role of private long-term care insurance cannot but gain in importance, particularly in the face of huge cost and coverage questions associated with government-run systems. The intergenerational transfer of wealth (from my daughter’s Social Security contributions to my mother’s generation, for example), is enough to make it hugely problematic, quality-of-care issues aside. It’s still a sleeping giant of an issue, but one that cannot continue to slumber indefinitely.
