Search Results for: affluent

Testimonial for LTC insurance

May 19, 2014 by Honey Leveen Leave a Comment

An obituary of Gaye McCutchen, who was highly educated and accomplished, deliberately makes mention of the long-term care insurance (LTCi) she owned, and how beautifully it worked.

I cannot tell from the obituary whether Ms. McCutchen collected from her policy for days, months, or years. But I can tell from the obituary that her LTCi made a striking difference in the quality of her life.

Here’s a quote from the obituary:

“Thankfully, her foresight in purchasing Long Term Care Insurance (LTCi), many years ago, made it possible for her to use her policy to pay for excellent home care during her illness. We thank all of the caregivers provided by Home Care Solutions, but special thanks go to Emelda Buezo and Charlene White. Gaye loved these dear ladies due to their warm and caring nature and upbeat spirit.”

Maybe Ms. McCuthen had the money to pay for all the care she needed from her savings. One thing I have observed, though, is that when people are sick, they don’t have time (or often cognitive ability) to finagle/buy/sell/liquidate/re-organize their estate to pay for unplanned, expensive long-term care costs. Often, the treatment of their illness is all-consuming, time-wise, physically, and emotionally.

People (and their loved ones) dealing with illness are often fearful and in no position to shrewdly re-arrange their finances. We often see affluent people who can afford the right long-term care resist getting the type of care they need.

Being ill and physically dependent, after a lifetime of independence is an incredibly sad thing. It must only compound such sadness when savings start flying out the window to pay for care costs, as well.

LTCi ownership is about having dignity, options and choices without hesitation or pause, just like Ms. McCutchen did. It is necessary to plan in advance if you want to ensure the type of quality outcome Ms. McCuthen had. LTCi premiums are not necessarily expensive. What can be expensive is needing long-term care for anything but a short period of time, and not owning LTCi.

Jawboning De Rigeur, But of Little Use

November 26, 2013 by Honey Leveen Leave a Comment

Recent coverage of long-term care by the parent company of the Public Broadcasting System’s NewsHour, and the SCAN Foundation, caught my eye. (Watch below)

I want to thank Steve Moses, President of the Center for Long-Term Care Reform for bringing this story to my attention.

Steve has given me permission to re-publish portions of his blog, below. You will read how Steve pokes holes in the testimonies of some of the most reputable LTC experts in the country.

Before you read Steve’s comments, I wish to editorialize. All we ever seem to see covered in the news – whether it’s mainstream media reporting on long-term care or political posturing – is jawboning about the need for long-term care conversation, discussion, and planning. The words strewn by various LTC pundits appease and sound appealing, but they are without teeth. Nothing concrete is recommended for addressing the 5,000-pound elephant in the room, which is: how do we pay for long-term care presently and when we are deluged with a Silver Tsunami of Baby Boomers who are woefully unprepared to pay for their long-term care? The lack of solutions to this mounting dilemma is disheartening, frightening, and frustrating for my colleagues and me.

I am doubly disappointed when I see such insipid, superficial reporting from sources I normally have great respect for: PBS and NPR. Here’s a blog I did about comparably inept, superficial, inaccurate LTC reporting on the Diane Rehm Show on NPR: /2012/reaming-diane-rehm/

Here’s a blog I called Neither Party has a solution for the oncoming deluge of Medicare/Medicaid services. This blog describes why neither Republicans nor Democrats wish to broach the subject of long-term care planning. Another blog, entitled Dismal Outlook for Medicare, Social Security, also explains why it is a politically unsavory no-man’s land for either party to broach the subject of realistic long-term care financing. Here’s a blog I did titled National Commission on LTC Finds No Solutions for LTC Crisis. Here are the National Commission’s actual recommendations: http://www.ltccommission.senate.gov/recommendations.cfm. Read them, and you will see the same insipid jawboning and fluff as Steve describes in his comments below.

By the way, Steve, thanks for your acknowledgement and praise for my AMG (Altruistic, Masochistic, Genius) status! (Read Steve’s comments to learn about AMG’s.)

Here is Steve Moses’s critique of the recent LTC forum, titled “Global and Regional Models for Long-Term Care: Can They Work Nationally?“:

LTC BULLET: PBS’S 6 TIPS FOR LTC MISS THE MARK

LTC Comment: Millions watch the Public Broadcasting System’s NewsHour every night. So when that show addresses long-term care it’s worth paying attention.

You can read about and view videos from a forum, titled “Global and Regional Models for Long-Term Care: Can They Work Nationally?,” that MacNeil/Lehrer Productions (the NewsHour’s parent company) and the SCAN Foundation sponsored on Monday.

But if you have better things to do, such as advising consumers on how to protect themselves from LTC risks and costs without depending on tottering government programs, let me save you some time.

Following are quick summaries of PBS’s “6 tips for averting America’s looming long-term care crisis” followed by our critique of each.

PBS Tip #1: “Keep it Local” The Urban Institute’s Howard Gleckman says don’t seek a “single answer.” Rather work from the bottom up with friends, neighbors and families taking the lead. “To the degree that we can, government can at least try to stay out of the way of those solutions . . ..”

LTC Comment: Hear, hear! Finally something from this writer with which I can agree. But true to form, he reverts to form a few sentences later, advocating more and bigger government programs.

PBS Tip #2: “Change the Financing” Former CMS Administrator Dr. Mark McClellan, currently with the Brookings Institution, says “let people control how [Medicaid] money is spent on their behalf. That’s what’s behind our ‘Money Follows the Person’ [MFP] initiatives in states around the country . . ..”

LTC Comment: Terrific. MFP programs are a vast improvement over the current LTC financing system which makes providers–not patients–the program’s customers. But “Money Follows the Person” still depends on payments coming from an unsustainable welfare program. Making Medicaid more attractive to more people is not a solution.

PBS Tip #3: “Focus More on the Poor” Dr. E. Percil Stanford, president of Folding Voice and the KIND Corporation, says “Unfortunately, considerable [LTC policy] attention from the most well-intentioned institutions and organizations has focused primarily on the middle and upper classes.” Instead, he says, they should focus laser-like on the poor elderly.

LTC Comment: Right on, but how? No answer from this source. Research shows Medicaid’s LTC program benefits the middle-class and affluent as much or more than the poor. The solution is to target scarce public benefits to the needy and use some of the savings to incentivize early and responsible LTC planning by more prosperous people.

PBS Tip #4: “Build a Comprehensive National Strategy” AARP’s Debra Whitman wants us to spend more government money to help family caregivers, grow Medicaid, expand “affordable” housing and transportation, “integrate” health care services, and eliminate LTC impoverishment.

LTC Comment: Typical AARP eyewash. Not a word about where the money will come from to pay for such wishful public program expansions. The federal government already borrows a third or more of everything it spends. It forces interest rates to near zero to make such borrowing feasible temporarily. Watch out when this bubble bursts.

PBS Tip #5: “Begin the Conversation” Jennie Chin Hansen, CEO of the American Geriatrics Society [AGS], thinks we should “chat and chew” LTC issues with our friends and colleagues creating a “study group” opportunity to “discuss the universal journey.” She says “Let’s proactively help each other build greater confidence, clarity and capacity.”

LTC Comment: Doesn’t that advice sound vacuous coming from the head of the AGS? We’ve been jaw-boning long-term care for decades without addressing the real problem, i.e. government pays for most high-cost LTC which anesthetizes consumers to the risk and crowds out responsible LTC planning and private financing.

PBS Tip #6: “Make It a Human Right” Dr. Laura Gitlin of the Center for Innovative Care in Aging says “We need to grow a long-term care system based on . . . [the] principle . . . that long-term care is a basic right.”

LTC Comment: Of all the empty rhetoric in this program, the prize for thoughtless irresponsibility goes to this proposal. If people have a basic human right to long-term care whether or not they are able or willing to pay for it, their “right” means someone else must provide LTC whether or not they are compensated for their effort. That is the definition of slavery, which is what this ostensibly caring academic actually advocates.

Closing LTC Comment: When I see the subterranean quality of LTC policy analysis displayed in program’s like this one, I’m nearly ready to despair. The one thing that keeps me going is that a few of you AMGs (altruistic, masochistic geniuses) are still out there having truly valuable conversations with real consumers about how actually to protect themselves from escalating LTC risks and costs.

The whole wobbly Rube Goldberg apparatus of government-financed LTC puts enormous obstacles in your way. It gives away what you’re trying to sell. It makes your product unprofitable by manipulating interest rates so that its programs are artificially viable. It falsely assures citizens they’ll be taken care of by bankrupt social programs already under-funded by trillions of dollars. Yet you soldier on. Somehow.

Hail to the AMGs!

Busting Another Ignorant Reporter

September 4, 2013 by Honey Leveen Leave a Comment

Here are some comments I made to correct an ignorant reporter for at www.Bloomberg.com

Click here for the article, which describes incapacity, then incorrectly describes how to prepare for incapacity financially. This compelled me to offer the following comments:

Setting a negative tone in the first paragraph describing long-term care insurance (LTCi) indicates the writers lack of research and insight into LTCi. The negative spin is unnecessary. Parts of the reporting are untrue. The negative “spin” truly does readers a disservice by discouraging them to plan responsibly for long-term care by thoughtfully researching LTCi (at more than the cursory level of Mr. Braham’s research). The “Goldilocks Group” makes no sense to me. We know statistically that twice as many of the affluent people described buy LTCi than do their less affluent counterparts. Choosing to fall back on Medicaid is a ridiculous notion for many reasons I will not state here due to time/space restrictions. I believe any “thinking” person who understands today’s economy, or has ever visited someone in a Medicaid-paid nursling home, even if they haven’t researched LTCi, knows why this is true. LTCi premiums can be made reasonable for nearly anyone willing to evaluate it with their eyes open.

The State of the Long-Term Care Insurance Industry

January 28, 2013 by Honey Leave a Comment

Thanks to my friend and colleague, Stephen Moses, president of the Center for Long-Term Care Reform, for allowing me to republish this address on the future of long-term care financing and long-term care insurance in the United States. The following is an edited transcript of a speech he delivered on January 12, 2013.

Don’t miss the irony in Steve’s speech. The good news for LTC insurance is actually very bad news for the U.S. economy. The only way to reconcile this seeming conflict is to resolve the LTC financing crisis in the right way.

The Good News and Bad News About Long-Term Care

by Stephen A. Moses

I have good news and bad news.

I’ll spend one minute on the bad news and the rest of my time on the good news.

The bad news is that all the reasons consumers have been in denial about the risk and cost of long-term care still apply and they are getting worse.

Government programs still pay for most expensive long-term care in the USA.

Government LTC benefits are much easier to get than most people realize.

And the Federal Reserve still forces interest rates to near zero which compels carriers to raise premiums to compensate, making LTCI harder to sell.

OK. So much for the bad news.

Here’s why LTC insurance carriers, distributors and producers are in the catbird seat primed to do well doing good for your clients and for your country.

First of all, everything that makes LTC insurance necessary remains true and is becoming more so. For example:

8,000 Americans turn 65 every day and that will continue for the next 18 years.

70 % of people 65+ will need some LTC and 20% will need 5 years or more

LTC is very expensive: As of 2012, over $80,000 per year for a nursing home; over $42,000 for assisted living; and over $60,000 for a home health aide on a daily 8-hour shift

But we’ve known all that since the inception of LTC insurance in the 1970s. Nothing new there.

So what is new? Why will the LTC insurance market explode within your career horizons and probably during the current four-year presidential term?

In a nutshell, all the obstacles to a strong LTC insurance market are about to come crashing down.

Let me walk you through them one by one.

The demographic bombshell of aging boomers is only now beginning to explode with the first of the 77-million-strong generation becoming fully eligible for Social Security last year and for Medicare the year before.

Government programs funding LTC are like Wylie Coyote in the Road Runner cartoon. They’ve gone over the fiscal cliff still wearing a silly grin, but they’re about to fall like an anvil. Why?

Basic federal government debt is $16.5 trillion, over $52,000 for every man, woman and child in the country. Our debt to Gross Domestic Product ratio is 100 percent. We borrow 42 cents of every dollar the federal government spends. Can you believe that? We go $1 trillion deeper in debt every year. That can’t continue for long.

Medicaid, which crowds out 2/3 to 90% of the LTC insurance market according to Brown and Finkelstein, has a terrible reputation for poor care and is bankrupting the states. Easy access to Medicaid and its big loopholes will end.

Social Security pays for about 13% of LTC through Medicaid spend-through, but Social Security has a $21 trillion unfunded liability. It can’t continue funding LTC.

Medicare pays generously for nursing home and home care which enables LTC providers to survive with most of their patients funded at less than cost by Medicaid. But Medicare has a $39 trillion unfunded liability, so it can’t continue either.

All three – Medicaid, Social Security and Medicare – will be means-tested. That means they’ll be welfare programs, not social insurance, and most middle class and affluent Americans will get less, if anything, from them.

Home equity will become a major source of funding for income security, health care and long-term care in retirement. That’s good for the reverse mortgage business in the short run and for LTC insurance in the long run as more people realize they need coverage to protect their home equity.

65 million Americans are unpaid caregivers, 7 of 10 of whom care for someone over 50 years of age. Those numbers will skyrocket as boomers age.

So what does this mean for you?

We’re about to enter a brave new world of long-term care. Keep doing what you’re doing and before long prospects will be knocking on your door instead of vice versa.

The public’s been asleep about LTC risk and cost because a government safety net has softened the financial consequences of going without LTC insurance since 1965.

As I’ve explained, that’s ending.

Already you see key changes indicating the public is finally getting the message. The age of purchase for LTC insurance has fallen by a decade from late ‘60s to late ‘50s.

You see and hear many more media stories about the risk and cost of long-term care.

Businesses worry more and more about absenteeism and “presenteeism” due to employees caring for elderly parents or worrying about them instead of working. That means you’ll sell many more group and multi-life policies.

Attorneys, financial planners and accountants are getting more questions from their clients about LTC. Just last week an estate planner called me to find out who could help him protect his clients. I referred him to a major distributor.

People are getting scared. They hear the news about the federal debt and deficit and unfunded entitlements. They’re caring for elderly loved ones in huge and rapidly growing numbers. The public programs they’ve relied on no longer instill confidence.

These trends develop slowly over time. They grow and grow like blowing up a balloon. Then they pop and all of a sudden everything is different. That’s what’s going to happen.

You are in the enviable position of being in the right place at the right time. Some of you have been pioneers in long-term care insurance. We know you by the arrows in your backs.

But your time has come now.

Watch for this scenario to play out.

Assuming current government policies stay the same, the American economy will continue to lag.

Domestic and international financial pressures will force interest rates up in spite of the Federal Reserve.

Federal debt service will skyrocket putting more financial pressure than ever on government programs that fund LTC such as Medicaid, Social Security and Medicare.

Policy makers will have no choice but to cut back on benefits, eligibility, and provider reimbursements.

The quality of publicly financed LTC will continue to decline.

It is true already and will be more true in the future that access to quality long-term care at the most appropriate level is assured only to those who can pay privately.

You are the heroes who will show the next generation how to avoid the pitfalls of publicly financed long-term care.

One of the things I love most about speaking with my many friends who have been selling long-term care insurance for two decades or more, is to hear their stories about clients who have gone on claim.

Those clients are so appreciative that they elevate the producers who sold them their policies to the status of demigods. How enormously proud that must make them . . . you . . . feel.

And that’s what the future holds for you if you stay on course. You are the last line of defense between the people you meet and the dismal future that awaits them if you allow their denial about LTC risk to prevail.

So my advice to you is “Go forth with confidence and pride. Know that long-term care insurance is good and people need it. Everyone you protect is one less person to drag down the social safety net for the truly needy.”

Thank you.

Stephen A. Moses is president of the Center for Long-Term Care Reform (www.centerltc.com). Contact him at 206-283-7036 or smoses@centerltc.com.

Why Are We Willing To Discuss Fixing Social Security & Medicare, But Not Medicaid?

December 10, 2012 by Honey Leave a Comment

In his November 15, 2012 New York Times editorial, Paul Krugman demonstrates again that neither party is addressing the changes that will be truly necessary to curb growing budget deficits.

The only solutions to Medicare and Medicaid’s skyrocketing budgets that I’ve seen recommended are lowering Medicare and Medicaid reimbursements, and increasing Medicare eligibility ages. These are merely band-aid solutions.

Neither party is willing to address the hard changes that will be necessary to remove Medicaid from its economically dire predicament. I address this in my blogs Medicaid in deep trouble, no matter who wins the election and Neither party has a solution for the oncoming deluge of Medicare/Medicaid services.

For one thing, Medicare and especially Medicaid are complicated programs that most legislators and the public do not understand well. Furthermore, many of the most intelligent people I meet appear to suffer from resistance to discussing depressing sounding future events, such as planning for their elder years. And, tragically, this lack of planning frequently has dire consequences. More specifically, we know conclusively that very few middle-class Americans have done responsible long-term care planning.

Mr. Krugman argues, and I agree, that raising eligibility requirements for collecting Social Security and qualifying for Medicaid is needlessly cruel and would be hardest on our most vulnerable citizens – those who work in physically demanding jobs for little pay. And these changes would have little impact on the bottom line because those who depend the most on Social Security will not live as long as more affluent Americans since longer life spans are related to education and income levels. Raising the Medicare eligibility age a couple of years will also save the federal government little because seniors in their mid-to-late 60’s generally have decent health and cost Medicare far less than the very old.

Readers will note that few pundits write about how to fix Medicaid, nor do legislators approach Medicaid reform. Medicaid is our most expensive and threatened entitlement program. It is Medicaid-paid long-term care that will cause the most catastrophic budget shortfalls as the Baby Boomers continue to age.

Request a Free, No-Obligation LTCi Quote

Search Results for: affluent

Testimonial for LTC insurance

Jawboning De Rigeur, But of Little Use

Busting Another Ignorant Reporter

From My Blog

Podcast Illuminates LTC Need

LTCI is Magical at Time of Need!

Testimonials