A Look At New Ways To Pay For Long-Term Care

"This is the most fun time to be in the long-term care insurance business," declared Ronald Hagelman Jr. during a session on "The New and Revised Future of Long-Term Care Insurance" at the NAIFA Conference.

Hagelman is president of Broadtower Insurance Solutions, a national marketing organization dedicated to long-term care planning and insurance.

Much of Hagelman's presentation centered on recommendations made by the Long-Term Care Think Tank to the Society of Actuaries earlier this year. The think tank examined ideas for helping Americans pay for long-term care differently, making care more accessible for everyone, helping reduce the costs of care and mitigating the need for care in the first place.

One concept is the "Uberization" of home health care. The idea is to make it easier for more people to enter the home health care field, make home health care more accessible and make it easier for consumers to obtain services on demand. The result would be lower costs.

A health care lookalike policy also was suggested. This would be an LTCi policy that looks like a health insurance policy The policy would have a high deductible that increases annually (like a high deductible health plan) and a tax-advantaged savings fund that accumulates over time (like a health savings account).

Another suggestion is a flexible 401(k) account. This would give individuals and families more options to use defined contribution plan and individual retirement account funds to pay for long-term care services directly or buy LTCi.

A family long-term care account would help individuals or families save for the long-term care needs of family members with a benefit that lasts beyond their savings, thanks to an insurance element added to it. The family long-term care account would be a flexible premium deferred annuity, where if any one of the insured has a long-term care need, 2 percent of the accumulated savings becomes payable as a monthly benefit.