|
E-mail this page to a friend!
Money, Insurance & Investments for Seniors
State Efforts to Encourage Long-Term Care Insurance
Purchases Falling Flat
States far from goal
of half over 50 with private LTC insurance
 December 13, 2006 - State incentive programs to
encourage the purchase of long-term care insurance have failed to
generate the hoped-for increases in sales, a new study has found.
With baby boomers aging and Medicaid costs rising,
many states are trying to persuade individuals to purchase long-term
care insurance. The two main tools of persuasion are tax breaks and the
Long-Term Care Partnership program.
In a new the report, David C. Nixon of the
University of Hawaii's
Public Policy Center concludes
that both strategies are failing. The tax incentive programs have not
increased the sale of long-term care policies because the subsidies they
provide are insufficient to prompt anyone to buy such insurance. The
same people who bought the insurance with the subsidy would have bought
it without it, Nixon found.
Similarly, Nixon determined that the partnership
program, which offers special long-term care policies that allow buyers
to protect assets and qualify for Medicaid when the policy runs out,
have failed to induce additional sales of private insurance.
This is
significant because the partnership program, previously restricted to a
handful of states, is
now available for all states to use.
The study found that states are still far from the
goal of having half of the over-50 population covered by private
long-term care insurance.
Unless states enact substantially more generous
subsidies and focus the subsidies on more price-conscious potential
buyers of insurance," Nixon writes, "the programs are
counter-productive. They draw resources away from state coffers that
could be better spent preparing for the approaching long term care
crisis.
>> To read the full report, State Programs to
Encourage Long Term Care Insurance,
click here.
>> For a policy brief on the report,
click here. (Both documents
are in PDF format. If you do not have the free PDF reader installed on
your computer, download it
here.)
>> For more on long-term care insurance, including
partnership policies,
click here.
>> For any updated versions of the story at ElderLawAnswers.org,
click here.
>> For the ElderLawAnswers.org home page,
click here.
Click to More Senior News on the
Front Page
Copyright: SeniorJournal.com |
