“How to Use RMDs to a Client’s Advantage: Morningstar’s Benz,” by Jane Wollman Rusoff, ThinkAdvisor “Who should buy long-term care insurance? The long-term care question is the big risk factor in many retirees’ plans. People who don’t have long-term care insurance are courting a risk that they may incur big costs that could gobble up their portfolios. But those policies are very expensive. Yes, and premiums have been rising. So even people who thought they were doing the right thing in buying a policy have, in some cases, been socked with really large premium increases. What’s the risk if people
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“Medicare Advantage Enrollees More Likely to Enter Low-Quality SNFs,” by Maggie Flynn, Skilled Nursing News “Fee-for-service (FFS) Medicare has been increasingly de-emphasized in favor of newer payment models such as Medicare Advantage (MA), but a new study in the journal Health Affairs suggests that FFS might provide better skilled-nursing choices for its beneficiaries. ‘Even after accounting for the quality of nursing homes in a geographic area and the quality of Medicare Advantage plans in a geographic area, patients in Medicare Advantage plans tended to go to lower-starred nursing homes,’ David Meyers of the Brown University School of Public Health told
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“Wisconsin considers tax-protected long-term care accounts,” by Kimberly Marselas, McKnight’s LTC News “Wisconsin residents will be able to invest in long-term care funds set up like popular, state-based college savings plan, if legislators get their way. A bipartisan bill making its way through the state assembly would allow people to contribute $5,500 to $8,500 per year, depending on age, and withdraw the money tax free for qualified long-term care. . . . The sponsors and aging advocates who helped draft the bill describe it as an alternative to costly long-term care insurance designed to meet needs not covered by Medicare.
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“Millennials flock to nursing at twice the rate of baby boomers, staving off shortage,” by Shari Rudavsky, Indianapolis Star “Millennials are saving the nursing profession. Facing a potential shortage due to baby boomers retiring, nursing has welcomed an unexpected surge of millennials entering the field. Those millennials are nearly twice as likely to be nurses as their grandparents’ generation, the baby boomers, a recent Health Affairs study found. This trend has averted a potential workforce crisis and has implications for the future of nursing, said David Auerbach, one of the authors of the study.” LTC Comment (from Stephen A. Moses,
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“Pfizer Ends Hunt for Drugs to Treat Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s,” by Jonathan D. Rockoff, Wall Street Journal “Pfizer Inc. PFE 0.19% said Saturday it will stop trying to discover new drugs for Alzheimer’s disease and Parkinson’s disease, abandoning costly but futile efforts to find effective treatments for the disorders. . . . Like several peers, Pfizer has invested heavily in developing treatments for Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s because of the huge need, but met disappointment when once-promising compounds failed to work during testing.” LTC Comment (from Stephen A. Moses, President, Center for Long-Term Care Reform): More bad news on Alzheimer’s research. Pfizer Ends
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“What happens when retirement expectations meet reality,” by Alison Salka, MarketWatch “While spending patterns in retirement may differ substantially from preretirement expectations, the biggest deviation from expectations seems to be on health and long-term care costs. Four in 10 retirees are spending more than they anticipated. This finding is true across all demographic and income levels. This perhaps explains why four in 10 retirees said they were very concerned that significant health care costs will affect their standard of living, according to a 2017 consumer survey of the LIMRA Secure Retirement Institute.” LTC Comment (from Stephen A. Moses, President, Center
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