“Costs of New Long-Term Care Insurance Policies Vary Considerably,” ElderLawAnswers.com

“We’ve all heard the advice ‘It pays to shop around,’ but this has never been more true than with the current market for long-term care insurance.  According to the latest industry figures, the spread between the lowest and highest cost for virtually identical coverage was as high as 243 percent. ‘This is the largest spread I can recall in recent years,’ said Jesse Slome, director of the American Association for Long-Term Care Insurance (AALTCI), an industry group that issues an annual Long Term Care Insurance Price Index. ‘It’s rare to see one policy costing more than twice another policy when both are large insurers but each company gets to set their own pricing and each has their own target market.’”

LTC Comment (from Stephen A. Moses, President, Center for Long-Term Care Reform):

ElderLawAnswers.com, the Medicaid planners’ newsletter, was all over this much-publicized report by Jesse Slome and AALTCI about the wide variation in LTCI premiums. Evidently attorneys’ fees are more consistent? Maybe not. Rule of thumb:  the fee to qualify an affluent client for Medicaid is roughly equal to the private pay rate for one month in a nursing home. That easily varies from $5,000 (low end mid-west) to $15,000 (high end northeast) per month, a 300% range.