“The looming crisis in long-term care,” by Sam Baker, Axios
“How it works: Medicare doesn’t cover most long-term care services. The market for private long-term care insurance is tiny and fraught with failure.
- That leaves three real options: Be rich enough to pay out of pocket, be poor enough to qualify for Medicaid, or lean on family and volunteer caregivers.
- In many cases, seniors must do all three: They begin paying out of pocket, then quickly spend everything they have, making them Medicaid-eligible, but still rely on family members for at least some additional help.”
LTC Comment (from Stephen A. Moses, President, Center for Long-Term Care Reform):
If that were how it worked, we wouldn’t have a problem. People would worry about the high risk and cost of long-term care. They would prepare. But they don’t. Why? Because Medicaid has picked up most of the cost of expensive LTC for nearly six decades indemnifying people from most of the risk and cost after it’s too late for them to prepare privately. That’s the “Fallacy of Impoverishment” we’re trying to fix with public policy that saves Medicaid for the truly needy but incentivizes everyone else to plan early, save, invest or insure for the inevitable late-life need.
