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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: epicure who wrote (229296)	8/14/2013 10:05:16 AM
From: Bread Upon The Water	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 542202

Mandated federally deducted insurance premiums for Long Term Care is/are part of the answer here. Not politically doable right now, but as the Baby Boomers burn thru their children's inheritances for care this may change. We do have in place a provision that gives one credit for every dollar spent by a Long Term care insurance policy for one's care and protects this amount from the Medicaid 5 year look back provision (you can't give your assets away within 5 years of entering a nursing home and receive Medicaid benefits--the government can go to the people who received the assets and reclaim them and/or make you pay for the first 5 years of LTC before receiving Medicaid benefits). Let's say one buys a 3 year long term care policy for a 4500 a month benefit and then eventually goes into a nursing home or continuing care place and uses the policy amount over three years. At that point, before Medicaid will pay any of the LTC costs (if one didn't have LTC insurance) one would to use their own assets (spend down) to under 10,000 (there a lots of rules about assets one can keep: cars under a certain amount, the house if you have al living spouse therein, or a dependent living there who took care of you for two years before entering the nursing home) before receiving any payments from Medicaid for your care. But if one had had a LTC policy paying out 4500 a month for 3 years then one would only have to reduce one's assets to 36 x 4500 before receiving Medicaid benefits leaving that amount for one to blow or leave to your favorite girl int he nursing home (G). In other words your estate gets to keep about $150,000 dollars it wouldn't have had without the policy. So this is step in the right direction in encouraging people to self-fund LTC, and may lead to a federally LTC insurance program eventually.