Study Finds LTC Insurance Enables Claimants to Live in Assisted Living Communities, Receive Care at Home

A study tracking how people used long term care (LTC) insurance benefits found that a major impact of having LTC insurance is enabling claimants to exercise preferences for alternatives to nursing home care. Entitled “Private Long-term Care Insurance: Value to Claimants and Implications for Long-term Care Financing,” the study was recently published online by the Gerontological Society of America. (See: http://gerontologist.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2010/03/18/geront.gnq021.)

Researchers took a random sample from 10 LTC insurance companies of 1,474 individuals receiving benefits who were interviewed in-person by a trained nurse and then by telephone every four months for a 28-month period. About 96 percent of those filing claims were approved for payment. At baseline, 37 percent received home care, 23 percent assisted living, 14 percent were in a nursing home, and 26 percent had not yet begun receiving care.

Researchers found that only 20 percent of those studied ever received nursing home care over the 28-month period. Also, “despite the oft-cited preferences of the elderly individuals to remain at home with paid services if required, LTCI claimants frequently chose assisted living rather than paid home care or nursing home care.” The study found that the most disabled claimants resided in nursing homes and the least disabled in assisted living settings. However, nursing home and assisted living residents studied had comparable levels of cognitive impairment (64 percent and 63 percent, respectively), significantly greater than paid home care users (28 percent). Based on 3,604 person-waves of data, nursing home residents had the highest average monthly cost ($5,561) and assisted living residents had the lowest average monthly cost ($2,653) while those who received care at home spent $3,601 on average. The overwhelming majority were satisfied with their service providers, including nursing home providers, although nursing home residents were less highly satisfied than assisted living residents or paid home care users.