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Good post though, interesting stars, I wonder if it scales.
I pay about $65 month. I have this outside of employer who at the time did not offer it. One thing to keep in mind if you are considering signing for it at work, see if you are eligible to keep and continue coverage if you leave your employer.
I'm a little leery of long-term insurance. It seems extremely picky about what it covers and what it won't. The one from my employer only offers coverage for 3 years max, and won't cover home care.
I'm still researching though. To be honest, with all the insurance we're expected to (and being scared into) buy, how am I supposed to pay for the basics of living in the here and now?
"Weak": I feel the same way about the Baby Boomer generation. Imagine how it feels to be sandwiched between two HUGE population groups. The first robs us to take care of themselves, the other is large enough to lobby that we be left on our own without government support that we also paid into. Talk about being on the shit end of the stick...
I'm with Velvet. There's plenty of recrimination and blame to go around between generations. Gen X is definitely going to get the shaft from the Boomers. We'll almost certainly be the first to be told that Social Security is no go, after paying into it longer than any subsequent generations. And plenty of us will be left to care for the Boomers who are losing their shirts right about now too.
Yes, Gen Y and later generations have been indebted by previous generations in selfish pursuit of instant gratification and their own convenience. But it's not as though Gen X isn't in that boat too. At least some of us are aware that the party was unsustainable. Not all of us played the real estate flipping game. Some of us carry no credit card debt, and saved up a decent down payment for our homes rather than rely on "creative financing" and mortgages that should never have been offered.
Relevantly, as many nationally influential voices have repeatedly noted, Obama is part of Generation Jones, born 1954-1965, between the Boomers and Generation X. Google Generation Jones, and you'll see it’s gotten a lot of media attention, and many top commentators from many top publications and networks (Washington Post, Time magazine, NBC, Newsweek, ABC, etc.) specifically use this term to describe Obama.
Great op-ed on Obama as the first Generation Jones President in USA TODAY a couple of weeks ago:
http://www.usatoday.com/printedition/news/20090...
If you disagree with the label, ignore it; just look at the statistics as "people born between 1960 and 1980" rather than "Generation X."
My mother bought long term care insurance when she was in her late 70s, and it provided 80%-100% coverage, but I don't know for how long they would pay. I think it is significant that she got the coverage after having been diagnosed with breast cancer, which she survived. I don't know what she paid, but she wouldn't have bought it unless she believed she would be on the winning end of the deal.
I don't know whether we would ever purchase such insurance, but based on my mother's example, I think one should do it at an advanced age if possible. I don't know about the companies or policies in general, but I do know that if you have health insurance and go to the doctor, you are required to sign a form saying you will pay for your care if your insurance does not. The patient is required to pay insurance premiums, but the insurance company is not even required to pay the coverage it is selling. And of course, they don't, if it means they will not profit.
If you are counting on the government to take care of you, be prepared to have most of your assets drained away first.
If your state has a LTC partnership agreement, you can keep more of your assets before going on Medicaid, up to the amount of LTC benefits received. That helps. However, your LTC policy must have compound inflation protection to qualify.
My concern is that it's a HUGE amount of trust to put into a company. Normally, even in the insurance world, you're putting money in for a guarantee in the present time - and if that company overreaches itself, as long as it's not the exact time you need it (which is a risk), you can always jump ship and change to a new company for the future.
But in this case, you're trusting that company to stay solvent and in business for - what, 60 years, perhaps (speaking as a 30-year-old who hopes to make it to 90!)? And if it doesn't, you've now lost the entire investment you were counting on.
Plus, as people above have mentioned, it's really hard to be sure they're going to in the end cover what you actually need. I've been thinking about it a lot lately because I've been helping multiple family members deal with these issues... and so far, it hasn't mattered at all who had LTC insurance; noone's insurance really covered anything they needed, so everyone has been in the same boat. Those who felt their insurance should have paid have tried to fight it, but it's awfully hard to do, particularly when you need to start fighting just at the point your health is collapsing enough that you have to move to a LTC facility to begin with.
So, basically - if I thought it would really work, I would buy it in a heartbeat - LTC is what I worry about most in terms of long term financial planning. But, as things stand, I'm not sold; instead, I feel like I should be (1) saving as much as I can now in vehicles I have control over so that I can cover it myself as best I can, and (2) working to pay into the system appropriately and voting in such a way to maintain a functional public system of elder-care (which I do support - I don't think we'll ever reach the point where we're comfortable saying "I'm sorry, but if you screwed it up 50 years ago, we're just going to have to leave your 80-year-old self in the streets... tough luck!" - and as long as we're not willing to do that, we might as well accept it and try to make the program we have to deal with it as functional as possible).
If people do have experience with this type of insurance working as advertised, and feel like there are good reasons to trust it will continue to do so, though, I'd love to hear them - I want to believe!