Financial lessons from my family's experience with long-term care insurance

wallflower | 135 points

Healthcare in the US is broken and they won’t let you fix it because the money is too good. Think about the fact that PBMs, which is there to save and manage on pharma is incentivized to promote drug price inflation. That’s just one “small” piece of this clusterf*k. It’s layers and layers of these convoluted system of incentives.

As to OP, the simplest solution is to move out of the US early enough or become “poor” enough and be in a wealthy blue state by the time you get to this predicament.

lvl155 | 12 hours ago

My youngest and I were discussing how removing zoning barriers to ADU (in-law suites) can be a big win for families and small win for housing in general.

In short, build an efficiency apartment on family property for an alone-living relative. Family can better provide support; the relative's residence goes back into the housing supply.

The municipality provides usual construction inspections but doesn't prevent the construction for non-pragmatic reasons.

ref: https://duckduckgo.com/?t=h_&q=zoning+to+allow+ADU%2C+in-law...

WarOnPrivacy | 12 hours ago

There's another interesting twist to this. The insurance company is willing to pay a certain hourly rate to home health care providers. There is a limited number of health care providers willing to work for this rate. Supplementing the rate is not permitted. Lo and behold, it is sometimes not possible to find a health care provider which the insurance will pay for.

mhb | 5 hours ago

The best way to do long-term care for a loved one is to hire the nurses they like at a facility they stay at for a short while to treat the sick person at home. This is vastly cheaper than doing so in a facility, and the nurses earn more and are incentivized to keep the person as healthy as possible because the job pays very well since there is no facility extracting enormous overhead and executive salary costs from their salary.

narrator | 2 hours ago
[deleted]
| 12 hours ago

I wonder if moving his father to an assisted living facility at some point will be a better option. I have little experience with this topic so I am genuinely curious.

malshe | 12 hours ago

his notes are EXACTLY my experience. bookmark it.

mud_dauber | 11 hours ago

> they each paid about $14,000 in annual premiums for 10 years, and the daily benefit started at $200 per day.

Insurance companies have to make money, but that's not that good of a deal, and the payout isn't that high ($73k annually) considering you won't be doing much else.

dehrmann | 11 hours ago

From the European POV this is awful and marginally scary. A commenter down the article writes that she is gonna sell her mother's house in order to serve her and even that will not last long.

The way US health care functions is an argument that the nation's principles (all free capitalism and no public intervention) are problematic.

If I were POTUS for a season, I would make a volcanic erruption in the health system. If I needed to care an elder without insurance, I would pay out of pocket a willing friend or even a homeless and not proceed to euthanasia as a commenter suggested.

tsoukase | 5 hours ago

Delay, deny, defend --- this is the insurance industry's modus operandi.

Insurance is the only industry where customers are the enemy.

jqpabc123 | 14 hours ago

There are three things a nation needs to accept about universal health care:

(1) It’s expensive (2) Everybody has to pay (3) The government’s gotta run it

GnarfGnarf | 13 hours ago

You need to get this long before you need it, but also ensure it is good plan that will take care of you. The person in the article is lucky to have kids doing that, if you don't have kids who care who will care for you.

bluGill | 12 hours ago