Geriatric medicine and long-term care insurance

Long term care insurance.

Long term care is a relatively new employee benefit issue and was virtually unheard of two years ago. Long term care plans have been implemented in a handful of companies and government retirement systems. Long term care has become an employee benefits issue because of the growing awareness of the risks of long term care to the elderly and the costs of long term care. Long term care benefit pla...

Narrow Framing and Long-Term Care Insurance

We propose a model of narrow framing in insurance and test it using data from a new module we designed and fielded in the Health and Retirement Study. We show that respondents subject to narrow framing are substantially less likely to buy long-term care insurance than average. This effect is distinct from, and much larger than, the effects of cautiousness, risk aversion, or adverse selection, a...

Long-Term Care Insurance and the Family

This paper demonstrates that informal care by family members significantly weakens the demand for long-term care insurance. This result is largely driven by the fact that insurance does not cover informal care costs. To quantify the effect of informal care on insurance demand and evaluate potential welfare-improving policies, I develop and estimate a dynamic model of long-term care decisions be...

Long-term care insurance and Medicaid.

Depending on length-of-stay, somewhere between 29 percent and 38 percent of long-term care insurance purchasers who use nursing homes would qualify for Medicaid payments if they did not own a policy. This is equivalent to between 13 percent and 17 percent of all policyholders. Owning such a policy would, however, reduce spend-down rates among policyholders by 39 percent. Thus, in the presence o...

Policy Options for Health Insurance and Long-term Care Insurance