What Your Long-Term Care Insurance Actually Pays For
These days, home health care has grown to be an enormous industry, mostly because the senior population in this country has been expanding since the Baby Boomer generation began aging. In Colorado Springs, CO, you can take advantage of the superior home care services provided by Gentle Shepherd Home Care, an organization which has been voted the ‘Best in the Business’ by the Colorado Springs Journal for Home Health Agencies. With that kind of recommendation, you can be sure our caregivers offer the kind of compassionate, caring service anyone would want for a senior member of their family. When you have the right kind of long-term care insurance, you can have this care completely covered, so your senior loved one can be supervised and cared for right in the comfort of his/her home.
What exactly is long-term care insurance?
Long-term care insurance is coverage which provides adult day care, home health care, or nursing home care for people aged 65 and above, who have a disabling condition that requires constant monitoring. Since long-term care would be very expensive if you had to pay for it out-of-pocket, it’s generally necessary to have some kind of long-term care insurance.
Example:
If you had to pay for just three visits per week from a caregiver, that would probably cost you in the neighborhood of $9,000 annually. If you had to pay a nursing home facility for skilled care, that might cost you somewhere around $80,000 per year. The cost of home care varies from state to state, and in the most expensive areas such as Connecticut, you might have to pay as much as $150,000 annually. In many areas of the country, this would pay for an entire house – and you’d have to pay it annually.
What does it pay for?
Long-term insurance covers the cost of home care visits right from the first day the policy goes into effect. This means it will pay the cost for a visiting caregiver or one who is a live-in, providing constant care to a patient. This caregiver might be just a companion, or it might be a therapist or a registered nurse, who stays with the patient 24/7, up to the limits of the policy. In other circumstances, long-term care can provide coverage for assisted living, adult daycare, respite care, hospice care, and even home modifications that may be necessary for the home patient.
Sometimes long-term care will also cover living in a nursing home or a facility for Alzheimer’s patients, depending on the needs of the individual. There are basically two types of long-term insurance policies, those being the traditional ones and hybrid policies. Traditional long-term care policies are akin to automobile insurance policies in that you just constantly pay on them. Hybrid policies are a combination of life insurance plus long-term care insurance, and are not nearly as popular as the traditional policies.
