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

whitecoatinvestor.com

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

#81

Post by JTbane »

silisili wrote: post #74
lvl155 wrote: post #12

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” e…

Healthcare is little more than a jobs program at this point. I believe it is the largest industry by employment in every single state now. That compounds the problem even further. Really fixing it would put a double digit percentage of people out of work. I'm all for it, but I can see why politicians are hesitant.

>Really fixing it would put a double digit percentage of people out of work.

Eh, I kind of disagree. It would put a lot of insurance people and hospital admins out of a job, but the boots-on-the-ground providers would be fine.

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

#82

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

k4shm0n3y wrote: post #73
mike_d wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the Swiss system the private insurance companies are required to be non-profits. The government sets the standard for care and coverage and all the companies can do is compete on price. Basically what Obamacare was originally intended to be before they had to compromise to get it passed.

Who were they compromising with? The Congress had large Democrat majorities in both houses during the ACA legislative process.

The parties weren't yet ideologically sorted. The Democratic majority included dozens of members of the Blue Dog coalition, a conservative group who (among other things) didn't support healthcare reform.

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

#83

Post by zacherates »

k4shm0n3y wrote: post #73
mike_d wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the Swiss system the private insurance companies are required to be non-profits. The government sets the standard for care and coverage and all the companies can do is compete on price. Basically what Obamacare was originally intended to be before they had to compromise to get it passed.

Who were they compromising with? The Congress had large Democrat majorities in both houses during the ACA legislative process.

They were trying to get Republican votes so that the law would be bipartisan. In the end it passed on a party line vote, so maybe the compromises were a mistake...

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

#84

Post by phatfish »

k4shm0n3y wrote: post #73
mike_d wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the Swiss system the private insurance companies are required to be non-profits. The government sets the standard for care and coverage and all the companies can do is compete on price. Basically what Obamacare was originally intended to be before they had to compromise to get it passed.

Who were they compromising with? The Congress had large Democrat majorities in both houses during the ACA legislative process.

All the Democrats bought by the private health insurance companies I assume.

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

#85

Post by ta555555 »

thepryz wrote: post #29
SoftTalker wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wrote a longer response but deleted it as it was just a personal anecdote. Suffice it to say I'll never buy LTC insurance or participate in any elder care such as "assisted living" or "nursing care." It's all (IMO) engineered to drain old people of their assets before they die. Providing care is nowhere on the list of motivations of anyone involved.

I could not agree more. My father has a neurodegenerative disorder that requires 24 hour care. He did tons of research and purchased LTC insurance decades before he was diagnosed. Experiencing first hand how difficult and predatory both the insurance company and the care facilities are has made it so I will never put my own children through it. My plan is to just euthanize myself when the time comes.

[flagged]

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

#86

Post by silisili »

Avicebron wrote: post #79
silisili wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Healthcare is little more than a jobs program at this point. I believe it is the largest industry by employment in every single state now. That compounds the problem even further. Really fixing it would put a double digit percentage of people out of work. I'm all for it, but I can see why politicians are hesitant.

> Really fixing it would put a double digit percentage of people out of work. I'm all for it, but I can see why politicians are hesitant. I'd love to hear what you think "really fixing it" is, please share. I can report that all (almost all?) of the hospitals and their networks both big and small in the area I am in have had layoffs this year of admin staff and healthcare professionals (nurses, doctors, etc). They ha…

I don't know all the answers, but I can tell you that cutting doctors and services is not what I had in mind. Mainly the behemoth that is everything tangential to that, namely insurance and pharma, for two. I worked on the insurance side(in tech), and most people wouldn't believe the number of people involved between the doctor getting money from the patient.

On the contrary of your statement, I would also do everything I could to allow more (capable, of course) people to become doctors each year, though I'm not sure what all that would entail. It feels criminal to me that we limit residency while a) every doctor I've ever visited is way oversubscribed and in a hurry, and b) specialist appointments are months out.

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

#87

Post by squigz »

SoftTalker wrote: post #65
dehrmann wrote: post #45

> 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.

Consider also that by the time you need a nursing home or some other form of continual skilled care you are probably going to die within that year. "Long-Term" is sort of a scare tactic that is used to get you imagining that you're going to be needing expensive skilled care for years. That can happen, but isn't normal.

Given that my only experience with such homes is indeed long-term, I'd be curious to see actual statistics on this

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

#88

Post by [deleted] »

Avicebron wrote: post #79
silisili wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Healthcare is little more than a jobs program at this point. I believe it is the largest industry by employment in every single state now. That compounds the problem even further. Really fixing it would put a double digit percentage of people out of work. I'm all for it, but I can see why politicians are hesitant.

> Really fixing it would put a double digit percentage of people out of work. I'm all for it, but I can see why politicians are hesitant. I'd love to hear what you think "really fixing it" is, please share. I can report that all (almost all?) of the hospitals and their networks both big and small in the area I am in have had layoffs this year of admin staff and healthcare professionals (nurses, doctors, etc). They ha…

[deleted]

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

#89

Post by kasey_junk »

wredcoll wrote: post #49
MontgomeryPy wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In speaking with my republican father in law on his opposition to universal healthcare, it dawned on me that he views it as a sort of zero sum game. If he has healthcare today, and then universal healthcare offers it to folks that don't have it today, it is a loss for him.

Something I've run into in similar situations is the "moral necessity of punishment", sort of a reverse just-world fallacy. "There are people not good enough for health care and helping them would violate this natural order".

It’s absolutely the case that public health coverage will benefit some people who make bad health decisions at the cost to some of those who make good decisions (or the decisions themselves must be made by a central authority).

That doesn’t make it the wrong policy decision. Lots of systems we happily manage with similar dynamics. But I don’t think denying that basic fact is the right path forward. The moral hazard is real and worth acknowledging.

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

#90

Post by Avicebron »

silisili wrote: post #86
Avicebron wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Really fixing it would put a double digit percentage of people out of work. I'm all for it, but I can see why politicians are hesitant. I'd love to hear what you think "really fixing it" is, please share. I can report that all (almost all?) of the hospitals and their networks both big and small in the area I am in have had layoffs this year of admin staff and healthcare professionals (nurses, doctors, etc). They ha…

I don't know all the answers, but I can tell you that cutting doctors and services is not what I had in mind. Mainly the behemoth that is everything tangential to that, namely insurance and pharma, for two. I worked on the insurance side(in tech), and most people wouldn't believe the number of people involved between the doctor getting money from the patient. On the contrary of your statement, I would also do everyth…

Ok, I pretty much agree with everything you suggest.

Browsing HN has conditioned me to react to sentiment like "healthcare...it's a jobs program...solve it by putting people out of work (the market will magically fix it)" to essentially be code for "I support continued abuse and further deprivations against the poor"

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