Presented by RPW Solutions, LLC
What Is "HelpCare Insurance"
We use the term "HelpCare Insurance" to refer to any insurance or annuity product that includes coverage for long term care insurance - i.e., coverage that covers people who need help with activities of daily living, such as eating, bathing, getting dressed, etc. This encompasses a variety of product types that generally fall into two categories: traditional, stand-alone long term care insurance and hybrid or combo products.
Stand-alone Long Term Care Insurance is an insurance policy that reimburses you for your daily or monthly expenses for Home Health Care, Assisted Living or Nursing Home care. Some policies may pay this as an income benefit at a fixed amount per day or month regardless of your actual expenses. No death benefit is included in the policy although you can generally add a return of premiums death benefit rider at an additional premium cost.
Hybrid Long Term Care Insurance is a life insurance or annuity policy that contains long term care insurance elements. Essentially, a rider is added to a life insurance or annuity policy that allows you to use the death benefit or cash values of the underlying policy to reimburse you for the cost of long term care expenses. Many of these riders provide additional long term care insurance benefits beyond those amounts, generally up to a multiple of the death benefit or cash values of the underlying policy.
There are a wide variety of products within these two categories, several of which may be appropriate for your desires and circumstances. We can help you to understand how the specific products work, what benefit levels are best suited to your needs and budget, the quality and soundness of insurance companies providing the coverage and several other important factors that you should consider.
How does Long term care insurance work?
The basic elements of both traditional and hybrid long term care insurance are the same. The central concept is that an insured becomes eligible for benefits after they become unable to perform at least 2 of 6 activities of daily living without assistance or become cognitively impaired. Benefits then become payable after a waiting period such as 60 or 90 days.
Benefits are paid to reimburse the insured for the costs of custodial care received either at home, in an assisted living facility or in a nursing home. When purchasing the policy, the insured selects the maximum benefit per day or per month and the maximum total amount that the policy would pay over time. The insured also selects whether benefit levels will increase over time with inflation. These benefit selection decisions should reflect the costs of care where the insured lives, the degree of protection the insured wants to secure and the cost of the coverage.
Beyond these basic elements there are some important differences between traditional and hybrid long term care insurance. For example, many (but not all) hybrid policies require a significant single premium payment such as $50,000 or $100,000 or more. With that, these policies generally provide a cash value and a death benefit of an equal or almost equal amount. In contrast, most traditional long term care insurance require monthly or annual premiums but don't provide cash values and only provide a return of premiums death benefit for an additional premium. There are other differences that need to be carefully considered and we can guide you through them.
We are connected to the best extended care insurance providers
We are affiliated with a major national insurance brokerage firm that has relationships with the leading providers of various forms of extended care insurance. This includes companies like Lincoln Financial, Transamerica, OneAmerica and National Guarantee Life. This allows us to present to you both traditional long term care insurance as well as so-called asset-based plans that combine cash value life insurance or annuities with long term care coverage features.
We don't see our role as developing a plan for you and selling you insurance to fund it. Rather, we help you develop your own plan and present you with options for enabling your plan. This is your life and your family - with the right information, you will know what's best for you and your loved ones.
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At some point in our lives, we all need a little help.
Sometimes, a little bit of help is all we need. But at some point later in our lives, most of us will need more significant assistance - help with basic activities of daily living. As many as 70% of us will need this assistance for an extended period of time. When that day comes, some of us will discover for the first time that our health insurance and Medicare do not provide coverage for long term care expenses. And we will be shocked to learn how expensive that care is - perhaps $30,000 a year on the low end to $80,000 a year or more on the high end, depending on the care we need. That will be devastating news for our families who will then need to disrupt their lives in order to provide the assistance that we won't be able to afford having others provide to us. However, the fortunate among us will have long term care insurance to call upon - that is, "HelpCare Insurance" - to provide the assistance that we need. But this insurance will only be available if we make provision for it years in advance of when we might expect to call upon it. So let's discover more about HelpCare Insurance.
