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| My wife and I are both retired. About 3 yrs. ago (before I retired) we purchased Long Term Health Care Insurance, which we are still carrying. We were told, back then, that the average cost of staying in a nursing home was about $3000.00 per month. And we were told that there is about an 80% chance that sometime in your life time you will spend some time in a nerving home.
I was told that if you don't have long term care insurance and either you or your spouse go into a nursing home, It could bankrupt you or deplete your life's savings. And if you try to go into a state run nursing home they look back 5 yrs. into your financial records. In other words, if you have money they will take it to help defer the cost of the nursing home stay. With that being said, has anyone used long term care or had any experience with it, good and bad, or have a comment? |
Follow-Up Postings:
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- Posted by michaelalreadytaken No Cal (My Page) on Tue, Jun 26, 07 at 21:46
| Three thousand a month is about right for private nursing home care--or was. Some of the upscale places can cost even more. If you can afford the insurance--it makes good sense--if not you may want to consider other alternatives. A family member, in Louisiana, now deceased, gave away his property--everything--to the kids and retained usufruct until his death. That solved part of the problem of worrying about nursing home expense to the extent of his possibly losing the results of a lifetime of work--if leaving it to your heirs is what you want to do. I believe at the time that the exclusion period was six months, i.o.w. the property had to have been out of his ownership for at least six months or they could go back and reclaim it. That period of time may have changed. Only a good lawyer is going to know for certain. Cash is a different ballgame altogether. Single premium life insurance policies can sometimes provide a means of transferring any cash that isn't deemed necessary to maintain a lifestyle--if leaving it to your heirs is what you want to do. If there's a sizeable amount of cash involved then you can use this as leverage to insure that those gaining the real property "behave" since the beneficiary can be changed up until practically the moment of death. Talk to a financial planner (a CPA with experience in the field) and a lawyer. |
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| Research on if your insurance company actually pays claims. There was a long article in the NY or LA Times recently about people buying it, paying on it for years, and when they need help, the insurance company simply doesn't pay. The company bets that the customer will die or give up trying to collect if they delay payment long enough. It's really sad. Consumer protection is deteriorating rapidly in this country. |
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| Here's that article...you may have to register to see it, but it's free and they don't spam you. |
Here is a link that might be useful: NY Times article on long term care insurance
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- Posted by zeffyrose_pa6b7 6b7 (My Page) on Sat, Aug 28, 10 at 23:38
| It is a good idea---I'm over 80 years old and I doubt I would be able to get coverage now----We should have investigated this before we turned 70---- Florence |
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| My mother was in a county run nursing home last year until she died and it cost nearly $11000 per month. A minimal care facility which is defined as providing no care but having a nurse on duty all the time costs about $2500. This is in upstate New York. Medicare does not pay for long term care but Medicaid does but only for the indigent which means you need to have nothing left before they will pay. At least 90 percent of the patients in the nursing home where my mother was were on Medicaid. I would guess that probably 75 percent had Alzheimers. One couple there I recall was particularly touching because the wife had Alzheimers and had to be put in the facility which exhausted all their assets so the husband was admitted as well. The two of them were together. Requiring long term care will assure you will be destitute in you old age unless you have insurance that will pay the very high cost that your care will likely entail. Such insurance is not cheap but insurance that doesn't pay enough is worthless. What is the answer? I don't know. Most people are advised to dispose of or otherwise shield their assets and make the state pay for their last days. Not a pleasant thing to think about. |
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