LTC Bullet:  What Have You Done for Me Lately?

December 18, 2015

Seattle—

LTC Comment:  Our annual report follows the ***news.***

*** ILTCI MOBILE APP READY.  The 16th Annual Inter-Company Long-Term Care Insurance Conference convenes at the Grand Hyatt hotel in San Antonio, Texas March 13-16, 2016.   Go here for more information and to register if you’re not on board already.  Denise Liston, 2016 ILTCI Conference Chair, reports that the ILTCI 2016 Mobile App, sponsored by Mutual of Omaha, is now available!  It's easy to connect with everything you need to make this year's ILTCI conference a great experience.  Download the app and use your cell phone/tablet to:  

  • Access the full event schedule, select sessions to attend, and create your own personal agenda
  • Access maps of The Grand Hyatt and session/event locations
  • Find out who's attending and share contact information
  • Preview the speakers, read their bios, and view presentations as they are finalized and posted
  • See who's exhibiting and easily locate their booths
  • Participate in live polling during the sessions
  • Complete session surveys
  • Surf through the Social Wall; read live displays of Tweets, Instagram photos, and LinkedIn posts. Post your own messages using the hashtags #ILTCI16 or @ILTCI.
  • Get important updates and exciting offers through the app
  • Play our Click Game to win prizes, share photos and join in the fun

To download the app visit the Apple Store or Google Play then:
o   Search for ILTCI
o   Download (It's that easy!) ***

*** ARTICLE HIGHLIGHTS CENTER.  Long-time friend and corporate member of the Center, Christine McCullugh, president of LTC Solutions, Inc., featured the Center for Long-Term Care Reform and an interview with Steve Moses in her monthly column for Health Insurance Underwriter’s December 2015 issue.  Titled “Close-up on Group Long-Term Care:  When Did Medicaid Become the Solution to Long-Term Care Financing?,” you can read the article here at page 36.  ***

*** MEMBERSHIP BENEFITS.  Let’s take a moment to review the benefits of individual and corporate membership in the Center.  For more details, see our “Membership Levels and Benefits Schedule.”

In a nutshell, as a regular member of the Center ($150 per year or $12.50 per month), you’ll get our weekly LTC Bullets and LTC E-Alerts and a user name and password for access to our “Members-Only Zone.”

In “The Zone,” you’ll find the “Almanac of Long-Term Care,” our compendium of LTC news, reports and statistics stretching back more than a decade with links to critical research materials covering eleven topics from “Aging Demographics” to “Unfunded Liabilities.”

Other features in The Zone include key Medicaid and Medicare numbers updated yearly and archived, a transcription of our highly regarded “Long-Term Care Graduate Seminar,” links to the major current and past “Long-Term Care Cost Surveys,” a couple dozen reasons why veterans should not rely on VA benefits for long-term care and much more.

If you’re really serious about a career in long-term care financing, then join the Center as a “Premium Member” ($250 per year).  At that level, you’ll have all the benefits of regular membership plus email and phone access to Steve Moses with a 24-hour turnaround and a subscription to our “Clipping Service,” placing you on the pioneering forefront of up-to-the moment news, data and analysis in your field.

Premium Elite members ($500 per year) get all of the above plus a complimentary LTC Bullet or LTC E-Alert sponsorship with a banner ad, complimentary Center membership for one assistant, and quickest-turnaround email and phone access to Steve Moses.

Regional Representative members ($500 per year) get all of the above and, after they meet all the qualifications—including five years qualified experience and completion of our LTC Graduate Seminar—the status of Regional Representative of the Center for Long-Term Care Reform.

Every member of the Center gets the “Big Benefit”:  the knowledge and personal satisfaction that you're supporting the indefatigable research and public policy advocacy of the Center for Long-Term Care Reform.

Corporate membership at the Bronze, Silver, Gold and higher levels is also available.  Each level includes the same benefits individual members receive for increasing numbers of employees or producers plus additional benefits exclusively for corporate members. ***

 

LTC BULLET:  WHAT HAVE YOU DONE FOR ME LATELY?

LTC Comment:  The Center for Long-Term Care Reform’s major accomplishment for 2015 was to conduct, complete and prepare a report on a study of long-term care financing in the state of New Hampshire.  While the report focuses on the Granite State, much of its analysis, based on the Center’s “Index of Long-Term Care Vulnerability” is applicable nationwide.  We expect to publish that report with the project’s sponsor, State Budget Solutions (SBS), early in 2016.  SBS will also convene a meeting with several think tank representatives to review and discuss the study’s findings. 

For the start of 2016, we have exciting news.  The Center for LTC Reform has received a contract to study the problem of Medicaid’s excessive home equity exemption which diverts up to $828,000 per recipient homeowner from private long-term care liability to the welfare program’s overburdened budget.  A secondary focus of the study is to review the egregious abuse of “Medicaid-compliant annuities” by affluent couples to qualify for Medicaid LTC benefits.  We’ll work with the highly regarded Foundation for Government Accountability to complete that project by fall of next year.  Our first LTC Bullet in January will provide details.

On that happy note, let’s turn to the Center for Long-Term Care Reform’s other 2015 activities in brief.

LTC Bullets

The Center for Long-Term Care Reform endeavors every year to keep our members educated and updated about important news and developments bearing on long-term care financing policy.

Once a week, usually on Fridays, we publish our LTC Bullet.  The Bullets are often policy pieces, sort of like op-eds.  You can always find the five latest Bullets here and archives of all 1113 Bullets (so far), by date here and by topic here.  These 1100-plus articles are a valuable historical resource.  Please make use of them. 

Some highlights of our 2015 LTC Bullets include:

January When Bad Models Happen to Good People
February:  Holding CMS’s Feet to the Fire
March LTC in the USA:  Who Provides to Whom and Who Pays?
April:  New Tool to Analyze LTC Spending Data
May Medically Underwritten Annuities for LTC
June CLTCR News:  Thousand Bullets Retrospective
July New Data on LTC Incidence, Duration, Cost and Financing Sources
August The Top 10 LTC Bullets of All Time
September:  LTCI Update from Broker World
October Another LTCI Hit Job?

November
The Future of Long-Term Care Seen Through the Prism of History
December:  So What If the Government Pays for Most LTC?, 2014 Data Update

The Center for Long-Term Care Reform published a total of 46 LTC Bullets in 2015.

LTC E-Alerts

Our LTC E-Alerts are a weekly compendium for regular Center members of the previous week’s LTC Clippings, described below.

The Center for Long-Term Care Reform published a total of 48 LTC E-Alerts in 2013.

LTC Clipping Service

Our LTC Clippings lift the burden of time-consuming research off the shoulders of LTC professionals whose time is better spent providing financial planning advice to clients, selling long-term care insurance, counseling borrowers on home equity conversion, or supplying any of the many other critical services our members provide. 

Center staff have to stay abreast of everything that’s happening in the popular and professional media.  We pore over tons of material so you don’t have to spend nearly as much time doing so.  We scan the print and electronic literature on long-term care services and financing every day.  We identify the articles, speeches and reports that we consider most important for Center members to read, hear or see.  Then we cite them by date, title and author; we provide a representative quote from the source; we give our “take” on what it means in our “LTC Comment;” and we send out approximately three “LTC Clippings” by email per work day.

Reading the LTC clippings on the go keeps your professional knowledge at a peak minute-by-minute.  They make a nice break from other duties.  And you’re probably more likely to read a few items per day than to go through the whole list of publications in the weekly LTC E-Alerts at a sitting.

We explained all the details and pricing for the LTC Clipping Service in LTC Bullet:  New LTC Clipping Service.  Check it out.  If you’d like to subscribe, contact Damon at 206-283-7036 or damon@centerltc.com.

The Center for Long-Term Care Reform published a total of 672 LTC Clippings so far in 2015 or roughly 1.9 per calendar day and 2.7 per work day.  2015 was our fourth year offering the clipping service in real time. 

Season’s Greetings

All in all, 2015 was a challenging year for long-term care financing and for your Center.  We look forward to a better 2016 as the political ground becomes more fertile for public policy research and advocacy.  The pendulum has begun to swing back, away from expansion of government dependency and toward more fiscal responsibility.

We wish our many friends and members Happy Holidays, a Merry Christmas and Prosperous New Year.

The Center’s Clipping Service will continue without interruption, but for everything else, we’ll see you next year.

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