Long
Term Care Insurance
Medicare/Medicaid
In the United States, health Long Term Care Insurance is made more
complicated by Federal Medicare/Medicaid programs, which have had
the unintended consequence of determining the price of medical procedures.
Many suspect that these prices are set independently of medical necessity
or actual cost. A physician who refuses to accept a Medicare/Medicaid
payment will be banned from accepting any such payments for a number
of years, regardless of the reason for rejecting the payment or the
amount offered. In either case, this means that private insurers have
little incentive to pay more than the government does.
Common complaints of private Long Term Care Insurance
Some common complaints about private health Long Term Care Insurance
include:
Long Term
Care Insurance companies do not announce their health Long Term Care
Insurance premiums more than a year in advance. This means that, if
one becomes ill, he may find that his premiums have greatly increased.
This largely defeats the purpose of having Long Term Care Insurance
in the eyes of many.
If Long Term Care Insurance companies try to charge different people
different amounts based on their own personal health, people will
feel they are unfairly treated. Some states require that Long Term
Care Insurance companies cover all who apply at the same cost, or
that rates vary only by age of the insured; this rule has the effect
(called adverse selection) that healthy people subsidize sick ones,
and thus frequently only those in poor health buy Long Term Care Insurance,
making the premiums very expensive.
