Information About LTC Archives - Page 21 of 51 - Long Term Care Insurance Expert | Honey Leveen

Mechanics and Basics of LTC Rate Increases

November 10, 2014 by Honey Leveen Leave a Comment

I’m fond of this article about long-term care insurance (LTCi) rate hikes from The Society of Actuaries Long-Term Care newsletter.

Yes, I belong to the Society of Actuaries! I have for years. I’m in the LTCi section. I get a quarterly newsletter and try never to miss their annual conference. I normally can barely understand lots of their newsletter articles (which, unsurprisingly, are usually written by actuaries) because they’re so technical.

Once in a while, however, actuaries write articles that are accessible to non-professional mathematicians. “Mechanics and Basics of Long-Term Care Rate Increases” is an example of such a rare event.

Click here to read my prior blog about how and why LTCi rate hikes occur.

Any detail-oriented person interested in really understanding the inner working mechanisms of LTCi should read both my blog and this article.

Human-Caused Global Warming Is Here But Denied, Just Like LTC Odds

November 2, 2014 by Honey Leveen Leave a Comment

According to an article in the September-October issue of Audubon Magazine by Elizabeth Kolbert, who’s written the recently released “The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History,” 97% of all climate scientists agree that human-caused climate change is happening.

According to a Pew Research Center Study done earlier this year asking Americans about their own beliefs in global warming, only 45% of us believe human activity was the main cause. And only 58% of us know that carbon dioxide is the gas most scientists believe causes temperatures in the atmosphere to rise.

I am pretty fascinated by this denial of climate change. It parallels denial of the need for responsible long-term care planning in so many ways. I believe the psychological denial mechanism used to avoid believing in global warming is nearly identical to denial of the high probability of needing long-term care. Both are about avoidance of the most unpleasant facts. Both issues mandate discussion and education in order to understand them properly and to do something constructive about them.

Global warming has been in the press a lot lately and is now being given the credibility it deserves. Still, important discussions about it in Washington and most states is not occurring.

For most of the 25 years I’ve been selling long-term care insurance (LTCi), the press has often misrepresented the facts and typically led articles with a negative, inflammatory bias even when some truth follows. And financial pundits have often pooh-poohed the need for LTCi.

Recently, however, the press and pundits have begun to report affirmatively on the need for LTCi and responsible LTC planning. Still, not enough of us are following their lead. In coming years, there will be a lot of Baby Boomers and their families in turmoil and crisis due to unplanned needs for LTC.

Here’s a cool website called What We Know. Its purpose is to educate the public, which hopefully, will create better public policy concerning global warming. This site is produced by the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

The long-term care insurance (LTCi) industry has comparable, highly reputable sites with outstanding LTCi content and education. Here’s one: www.aaltci.org. Find links to several more, here.

No one seems to read these sites. Or perhaps they read them and there is some type of emotional disconnect, an inability to assimilate such inconvenient truths.

Nursing Home Infections Are Increasing…Surprise (Not!)

October 17, 2014 by Honey Leveen Leave a Comment

Here’s an October 9, 2014 article from McKnight’s LTC News describing recently published findings that show across the board infection rates in nursing homes have surged during the past five years.

Quoting from the article, “The prevalence of viral hepatitis in nursing homes increased 48% between 2006 and 2010, the investigators determined. MDRO prevalence increased by 18% and pneumonia by 11%. The rates of urinary tract infections, septicemia and wound infections also rose.”

Here are several additional blogs I’ve done about Medicaid’s shortcomings. Because most long-term patients in nursing homes are on Medicaid (a form of Welfare), and because Medicaid’s reimbursement to nursing homes is actually less than the cost of caring for such patients, many nursing homes are unprofitable. We all agree that the most important employees in nursing homes are the custodial caregivers. These are the lowest paid people on the economic totem pole. Counter-intuitively, these critical frontline caregivers are often the first place nursing homes fire to cut expenses.

My opinion is that because of inadequate care in many Medicaid-funded nursing homes, corners are cut. Quality of care suffers. Sad outcomes then occur. This is what is causing the rapid rise of nursing home infections. It is not hard to connect the dots on this one.

Many nursing home patients end up in such facilities because they do not have money to access better care. People who own long-term care insurance (LTCi) are far less likely to wind up in Medicaid-funded nursing homes. They are far more likely to end up in preferable, far nicer assisted-living facilities.

New Report Exposes High Costs Associated Dearth of Dignified Death

October 13, 2014 by Honey Leveen Leave a Comment

Last week, reporting on the largely broken, slippery slope of costly, undignified end-of-life outcomes too many families experience, broke in the news.

The news reported on a 21-member nonpartisan committee that was part of the National Academy of Sciences. This committee just released a report calling for sweeping changes in end-of-life care.

Many of the recommended changes could be accomplished without legislation. Other recommendations are just common sense AND would save a lot of money.

Here’s a summary of the recommendations:

Reimburse health care providers for conversations on advanced care planning.
Restructure Medicare, Medicaid, and other health care delivery programs.
Eliminate perverse financial incentives that encourage expensive hospital procedures when low-tech services like pain management and home health care are available.
Finally, accredited medical schools and groups as well as health providers should greatly increase training in palliative care.

My opinion is these changes cannot happen soon enough. I hope such reporting, accompanied by public outrage, continues.

Fighting to Honor a Father’s Last Wish: To Die at Home

October 1, 2014 by Honey Leveen Leave a Comment

Tying into last week’s news of the new report titled “Dying on America” I will recommend two stories that bring the report into the most personal of terms.

Here’s a past blog I did describing a gripping, highly rated book called, “Knocking on Heaven’s Door”. It puts what is imparted in the new report into very poignant, personal, compelling terms.

Just like the book “Knocking on Heaven’s Door, an article in the September 25, 2014 New York Times, called “Fighting to Honor a Father’s Last Wish: To Die at Home” is a heartbreaker.

Both the New York Times article and Knocking on Heaven’s Door put a human face on what “Dying in America” recommends, in the most poignant, heartbreaking ways.

The New York Times article describes a very beautiful, loving, highly functional American family. Despite the daughter’s tenacious, enduring fight to bring her father home, and at great personal sacrifice, our current system kept her father away from home. Most of his final years were spent bouncing between various forms of expensive, often negligent, in-patient care.

Home would have offered the father far more dignity and quality of life, much less suffering, at far less cost. The article beautifully, heartbreakingly, illustrates this.

Quoting from the article, “Many geriatric experts say that if the wasteful medical spending on this stage of life could be redirected, it could pay for all the social supports and services actually needed by today’s fragile elders and their families. Instead, public money has been shuffled in the same system, benefiting health care businesses but not necessarily patients.”

The changes recommended would most likely come at a net savings to the government. I hope reporting like this, combined with public lobbying, brings the recommended changes.

Request a Free, No-Obligation LTCi Quote

Mechanics and Basics of LTC Rate Increases

Human-Caused Global Warming Is Here But Denied, Just Like LTC Odds

Nursing Home Infections Are Increasing…Surprise (Not!)

New Report Exposes High Costs Associated Dearth of Dignified Death

Fighting to Honor a Father’s Last Wish: To Die at Home

From My Blog

Podcast Illuminates LTC Need

LTCI is Magical at Time of Need!

Testimonials