Essay On Long Term Insurance

While health insurance covers items like the treatments and prevention of health problems, coverage is often lacking when it comes to long-term care needs. Long term care insurance helps make up the difference where health insurance coverage lacks when facing the high costs of items like personal or custodial care. This includes services that are performed in a home setting or in a facility like a nursing home.

Overview

Long term care insurance reimburses the owner of the policy for daily care services when they can no longer perform them on their own, whether due to age, injury or illness. This typically includes help with daily activities like eating, bathing, toileting, dressing and regular medical care or medical observation.

While federal programs like Medicare will sometimes pay for long-term care services, there are limitations. Generally Medicare will only pay for qualified short-term services up to 100 days, and will only pay a portion of the total expense after the first 20 days. Since many people who develop the need for long-term care require these services for indefinite amounts of time, purchasing a long-term care plan can end up saving the member and their family a large amount of money if they end up requiring additional care.

Benefits and Coverage

The majority of long-term care products on the market
In general, companies will not approve a policy if you are currently using a long-term care service or already need long-term care. Certain diseases or conditions may also disqualify you from receiving benefits including metastatic cancers, dementia, AIDS, Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s, multiple sclerosis or if you've had a stroke in the last two years. Different insurance companies have different qualification guidelines, so just because you were rejected by one company, does not mean that you will be rejected by all of