What is Long Term Care Insurance?
When your insurance agent tries to sign you up for a long-term care plan, he/she is not being pushy, but practical, urging you to take control of your future years. You would want to hold on to the independence of your carefree young days and protect your assets from being consumed by long term care needs. Don't ask at which stage of your retirement planning you should start investing in Long Term Care Insurance, rather if you haven't, start looking up Long Term Care Insurance right away. Long Term Care Insurance are practical and affordable ways to ensure peace of mind for you and your family.
If you are already thinking of who is going to take care of you once you are aged and on your own, or who is going to keep the house in order and mow the lawn, or where you can go to have yourself looked after in case of a medical condition, you are already anticipating long-term care needs. Long-term care involves assistance with eating, bathing, cooking, dressing, shifting from a bed to a chair, continence or toilet purposes. Long-term care is delivered either at one's home, continued care homes or nursing homes.
What are the odds that you would need Long Term Care Insurance?
As much as one wishes that one would never need long-term care, statistics relating to long-term care requirement are in favor of planning for one's long-term needs through insurance.
- At least 40% of people above the age of 65 will need long-term care. By 2020, 12 million senior Americans are expected to need long-term care.
- A year at the nursing home could cost as much as $60,000 in larger cities. About 10% of all people seeking health care in a nursing home are likely to stay there for a minimum of 5 years, affecting nursing home bills exponentially.
- A home health aide visiting could charge as much as $52.
- Specialized nursing at home, which could include giving medication or administering oxygen, could be billed at $24,440 a year.
- Medicaid, which covers home health care and nursing home care kicks in only when you have declared yourself and your spouse "poor"; it comes with no small loss of dignity.
- Medicare payments in case of hospital stays can stop according to the Prospective Payment System. In such instances patients are released from the Medicare-certified hospital regardless of the patient's condition.
- Even when the patient is recuperating in a nursing home after being coercively discharged from the hospital. Medicare coverage is puny, just 2% of the bill.
By insuring your long-term care needs you would be bringing down these medial expenses to a manageable amount, ensuring that you get care in the manner that "you prefer" and in a location of your choice.
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