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[quote=Anonymous]I struggled with this a while ago and got one parent a LTC policy because she doesn’t have much in the way of retirement assets beyond social security.

For ourselves I lean towards nor fetting it but leave open to revisit when we are late 50s or so. There are disabilities/diseases that can cause you to need LTC earlier but many people wouldn’t need it until their 80s and 30 years is a long time to be paying premiums.

Two things I learned—

1) even a policy that says it has a fixed premium for your lifetime can increase— the difference is tht the insurance company has to go to the atate insurance  commission and makr a case for why they should be allowed to do it.

Ten years ago this was quite frequent, today it is less frequent as the companies have learned to increase their premiums. But you should still expect that sometime in the next 20-30 years you will be given a choice between paying more for the insirqnce you have or accepting less insurance.

2) look for (or at least into) a “partnership” policy— this is a policy that meets certain minimum requirements set by the state for coverage. Then, if you exhaust your LTC coverage and need further nursing home care under medicaid, the state will allow to keep for yourself assets equal to the amount of LTC coverage you had.

Normally to be eligible for medicaid you would need to “spend down” all your assets until you were poor enough to qualify for medicaid, but with a partnership policy if your LTC insurance covered $700,000 of nursing home expenses then you can keep $700k of assets and still qualify for medicaid.

In my experience the LTC insurance company sold both partnership policies and non-partnership policies and getting the partnership label on the policy did not cost extra (but the minimum coverage requirements might be higher than you’d otherwise buy— for example a certain inflation rider).

The state of CT pioneered these policies and had a lot of info on their website, at least when I was looking.

Also the bogleheads forum has a ton of info/debate on LTC insurance. Very roughly I would say many posters there are sceptical that current policies being offered are worthwhile (although some people, particularly those who purchased when premiums were cheaper) are happy with their policies. [/quote]

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