LTC Bullet: NIC on LTCI

Wednesday December 26, 2001

Seattle--

The National Investment Center (NIC) recently published a report titled "Private Long Term Care Insurance and Its Impact on Demand for Facility-Based Care." We think Bullets readers will find this study of special interest because it reflects the hard-nosed, show-me-the-money perspective of the financiers of long-term care.

As we showed in the Center for Long-Term Care Financing's LTC Triathlon report (http://www.centerltc.com/pubs/triathlon.pdf), the professionals who provide the debt and equity capital for the long-term care industry know little and care less about LTCI, while they focus heavily on Medicaid and Medicare, the ailing dinosaurs of LTC financing. This new report is early evidence that long-term care financiers have begun to take long-term care insurance seriously. Nevertheless, they conclude private insurance has only a tiny role in the service delivery system today and that LTCI is unlikely to have a major role in paying for long-term care for the foreseeable future.

According to its mission statement, the publisher (NIC) facilitates efficient capital formation for the seniors housing and care industries through research, networking, and providing business and financial information. The authors of the report are Joel Leon, Ph.D. and Jonas Marainen, B.A. of the Polisher Research Institute at the Philadelphia Geriatric Center. NIC's web site describes the report:

"This [57-page] working paper provides an overview of current issues and research findings on private long term care insurance, the self-financing of long term care, and how changes to both will affect the growing demand for seniors housing and long term care. Issues explored include: the size of the potential long term care insurance market, the nature of market segments, rates of market penetration and diversity of products. It also reviews the efforts to date toward self-financing and how they have been received by the public."

To purchase a copy of "Private Long Term Care Insurance and Its Impact on Demand for Facility-Based Care," go to www.nic.org and follow the links through their "research library," scroll down to find and order the report online for $50.00.

LTC Comment: One thing we particularly liked about the NIC report on LTCI was its frequent references to the Center for Long-Term Care Financing's analysis of why market penetration by private long-term care insurance has been so slow. The report repeatedly cites our study titled "The Myth of Unaffordability: How Most Americans Should, Could and Would Buy Private Long-Term Care Insurance" (http://www.centerltc.com/pubs/Myth%20Report.pdf). The NIC report also references the Center for Long-Term Care Financing's proposed solution called LTC Choice, as described in "LTC Choice: A Simple, Cost-Free Solution to the Long-Term Care Financing Puzzle" (http://www.centerltc.com/pubs/CLTCFReport.pdf). A major goal of the Center for Long-Term Care Financing is to foster communication, cooperation and coordination between the major private sector stakeholders in long-term care--the financiers, providers and insurers who make the system work. We believe that NIC's study of LTCI is an important step in the direction of achieving that goal.