Long Term Care Insurance – Don’t be Fooled by Those Misleading Statistics

The insurance industry has realized its time recognizing its potential customer’s awareness. One advertisement leaflet now focuses that the company’s goal is to “serve you-as the potential clients)-maintain your freedom.” Another provides “facts” that can help you better see the risks associated with long term care. It is what we can do in serving you maintain your personal and financial independence should you need long term care.” But often these promises about “freedom,” whether by design or not, tend to be false.

The insurance advertisement leaflets are not promising to keep you out of a home care service. Alternatively, the promotional booklet is careful not to displease the nursing home industry, which itself wants people to buy long-term care coverage. By doing this, when they are accepted to a home as private pay or insured residents, they will be subjected to a higher room rate than those supported only by Medicaid.

Unfortunately, it’s only for millionaires, those who are so poor or those who do not have assets or investments they want to protect that should be lacking of a long term care insurance policy. Judge yourself now, if you are not part of this group; then you should be prepared for bumping road ahead. This could be a disastrous condition should you have a previous track record of diseases that need long term care in your family or if you’re 50 years plus.

If you are belong to group of over 60, chances are that you have been frequently bombarded with seminar and lunch invitations from insurance agents presenting long term care insurance policies. If you’re under 60, your lunch is frequently disrupted by phone calls with the same marketing offering. You can see clearly the motives of these insurance agents are intent on having you experience what you can need in your old age: unavoidable catastrophic. This fact is enough to make you lose your appetite.

The pitch goes this way: Do not concern about your property insurance; your risk of making a claim on your homeowner’s insurance is as dismal 1 in 90. Don’t worry to much for a car accident? Generally, your probability for having a car accident is about 1 in 50. This is the reason why when you purchased your first car, you also purchased a collision and auto liability insurance policy. If you make it past 50, you have a one in five probability of eventually needing long-term care.

If you reach 65, your chances of spending time in a nursing home increment to 46 %. Should you reach 80 years of age, and you have a one in two chance of joining your remaining friends and neighbors in a long term care facility.

Is it wise to avoid something if the odds are 50/50? You won’t be to be the same boat with those folks who end up in long term care unprepared. Consider that over 55 percent of those who receive long term care end up paying out of their own pockets just because they either were unknowing or don’t have any preparation at all. More than 40 % of would use Medicaid because they can’t afford it. Indeed, these are fearful facts.

This frightening pitch became so bothering for the executive director of a large trade association that he wrote to the CEO of the insurance company. Long term care insurance coverage was intended to be an attractive perk of membership, said the director, but the agents who were presenting the plan during home visits were frightening the member’s right out of the association. Then come some intriguing questions. Why would anyone want to hear that because of the high “statistical probability of ending up in a nursing home” they could expect to see their “life savings wiped out” and their caretakers debilitated?