Why Do People Let Their Long-term Care Insurance Lapse? Evidence from the Health and Retirement Study (original) (raw)

The Impact of Private Long-Term Care Insurance on the Use of Long-Term Care

Inquiry, 2011

This paper investigates the effects of privately purchased long-term care insurance (LTCI) on three major types of long-term care services: nursing home care, paid home care, and informal care received from family and friends. Using 2002-2008 data from the ongoing Health and Retirement Study, we analyze the determinants of long-term care utilization simultaneously with the determinants of holding LTCI. We find that LTCI has modest effects on the likelihood of using long-term care services. For the very frail elderly, private LTCI enhances their access to nursing home care. For those with moderate disability, LTCI makes it more likely that they can remain at home and receive home care services, instead of going to a nursing home. We find no evidence that formal care substitutes for informal care in the presence of LTCI. These findings suggest that if LTCI becomes much more prevalent in the future, many older adults will be able to choose the type of long-term care arrangement that best suits their needs.

Why Don't People Buy Long-Term-Care Insurance?

The Journals of Gerontology Series B: Psychological Sciences and Social Sciences, 2006

Objectives. The objective of this article was to assess the determinants of an individual's decision to purchase longterm-care (LTC) insurance. This article focuses on the decision to purchase a new policy as opposed to renewing an existing policy. This study gave special consideration to the role of policy price, the savings associated with buying a policy now as opposed to later, the purchaser's education, and the purchaser's income.

The Long-Term-Care Insurance Puzzle: Modeling and Measurement

2016

Individuals face significant late-in-life r isks, prominently i ncluding the need for l ong-term care (LTC). Yet, they hold little long-term care insurance (LTCI). In this paper we use a structural model and a purpose-designed dataset to understand the determinants of insurance demand. We distinguish between a fundamental lack of desire to insure, crowd out from existing insurance, and unmet demand due to poor products available in the market. The model features individual-specific n on-homothetic h ealth-state-dependent p references o ver n ormal consumption, consumption when in need of long-term care, and bequests, which are estimated using strategic survey questions. To account for differences between the modeled and measured insurance products, we study not only individuals' holdings of LTCI, but also their stated demand for an idealized product that mirrors that in the model. We find that many individuals would purchase LTCI and receive a large consumer surplus if it were a better product, while many others do not want to purchase even high-quality actuarially fair LTCI due to the values of their heterogeneous state-dependent preferences, their demographics, and their financial situation.

Long-term care insurance: Does experience matter?

Journal of Health Economics, 2015

We examine whether long-term care (LTC) experience helps explain the low demand for long-term care insurance (LTCI). We test if expectations about future informal care receipt, expectations about inheritance receipt, and LTCI purchase decisions vary between individuals whose parents or in-laws have used LTC versus those who have not. We find parental use of a nursing home decreases expectations that one's children will provide informal care, consistent with the demonstration effect. Nursing home use by in-laws does not have the same impact, suggesting that individuals are responding to information gained about their own aging trajectory. Nursing home use by either a parent or in-law increases LTCI purchase probability by 0.8 percentage points, with no significant difference in response between parents' and in-laws' use. The estimated increase in purchase probability from experience with LTC is about half the previously estimated increase from tax policy-induced price decreases.

The Private Market for Long-Term Care Insurance in the United States: A Review of the Evidence

Journal of Risk and Insurance, 2009

This article reviews the growing literature on the market for private longterm care insurance, a market notable for its small size despite the fact that long-term care expenses are potentially large and highly uncertain. After summarizing long-term care utilization and insurance coverage in the United States, the article reviews research on the supply of and the demand for private long-term care insurance. It concludes that demand-side factors impose important limits on the size of the private market and that we currently have a limited understanding of how public policies could be designed to

Private Long-term Care Insurance: Value to Claimants and Implications for Long-term Care Financing

The Gerontologist, 2010

The purpose of this study was to obtain a profile of individuals with private long-term care (LTC) insurance as they begin using paid LTC services and track their patterns of service use, satisfaction with services and insurance, claims denial rates, and transitions over a 28-month period. Design and Methods: Ten LTC insurance companies contributed a random sample of 1,474 qualified individuals who were interviewed in-person by a trained nurse and then interviewed telephonically every 4 month for a 28-month period. Used in the analysis were descriptive statistics and techniques for analyzing longitudinal panel data. Results: About 96% of those filing claims were approved for payment. At baseline, 37% received home care, 23% assisted living care, 14% were in a nursing home, and 26% had not yet begun using paid care. Few claimants reported that their policies restricted their choice of providers and most care costs were covered. The average number of care transitions was 1, typically occurring within 4 month of baseline. The less impaired and those in home care settings were most likely to transition between service settings. Implications: Having private LTC coverage enabled claimants to exercise their preference for alternatives to nursing home care.

Research on long-term care insurance: status quo and directions for future research

The Geneva Papers on Risk and Insurance - Issues and Practice

We provide a structured literature review of long-term care (LTC) insurance using main path analysis, a mathematical tool to identify the most significant paths in a citation network. We identify three major research areas (financing, demand, and insurability) and systematically evaluate them based on standard frameworks. We further review established and innovative (insurance) solutions for LTC financing. Our results illustrate the immense difficulties of insuring LTC both on the demand side (e.g., low value of consumption while in care, existence of substitutes) and supply side (e.g., lack of predictability and asymmetric information), explaining the marginal contribution of insurance mechanisms to LTC financing. Combined products that bundle the risks, and public-private partnerships that integrate LTC into the pension systems might help to overcome the insurability limitations. In addition, alternative financing methods that go beyond the idea of risk pooling (LTC bond, LTC put option, equity release) could help to improve the sustainability of LTC financing.

Supply or Demand: Why is the Market for Long-Term Care Insurance So Small?

2004

Long-term care represents one of the largest uninsured financial risks facing the elderly in the United States. Whether the small size of this market is driven primarily by supply side market imperfections or by limitations to demand, however, is unresolved, largely due to the paucity of data about the structure of the private market. We provide what is to our

Evaluating Consumer Preference for Private Long- Term Care Insurance

Despite significant growth in the market for private long-term care insurance in recent years, empirical research is lacking on how policy attributes affect consumer preference. Using conjoint techniques, the authors estimate the utility values associated with different levels of long-term care policy attributes, as well as the overall importance of the attributes. A simulation procedure for estimating the percentage of consumers who would prefer specific types of policies also is presented .

Tax incentives and the decision to purchase long-term care insurance

Journal of Public Economics, 2009

This paper studies the impact of the tax incentive prescribed in the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) on individuals' long-term care (LTC) insurance purchasing behavior. Using data from the Health and Retirement Study, we find that the tax incentive in HIPAA increased the take-up rate of private LTC insurance by 3.3 percentage points, or 25%, for those eligible. Despite this seemingly strong response, our results imply that even an above-the-line tax deduction would not increase the coverage rate of seniors beyond 13%, indicating that tax incentives alone are unlikely to expand the market substantially. We also present, to our knowledge, the first estimate of the price elasticity of demand for LTC insurance of around -3.9, suggesting that demand is highly elastic at the current low ownership rate. Finally, we evaluate the net fiscal impact of the tax incentive and find that the tax deductibility of LTC insurance premiums leads to a net revenue loss for the government, as the reduced tax revenue from granting the tax incentive exceeds the savings in Medicaid's LTC expenditures.