Home › End Of Life Doula › Long Term Care Insurance – Helpful Benefit or Expensive Scam?

Long Term Care Insurance – Helpful Benefit or Expensive Scam?

By lindasnyder on November 29, 2023 • ( 0 )

It depends on who you talk to!

One of my clients had been paying into long term care insurance for decades. He believed he had about $750,000 in benefits, and when his wife was dying at home, he wanted to use some of the money he’d been paying for over the years.

Nope.

He never saw a penny of it, despite doing everything right on his end.

Initially, he worked with an agency that promised he’d get reimbursed for the money he was paying for personal care staff. After more than a year of a dozen or so hours a week of caregivers in his home, the agency had not reimbursed him for a penny of what he spent – and he couldn’t get answers as to why.

After leaving that agency, he engaged my services.

The insurance agency called me and wanted to know what my skills are. I’m an end of life doula (non-medical), have a Master’s degree in education, decades of experience in the mental health field (including numerous mental health and behavioral trainings), and have been certified repeatedly in CPR/1st aid. There’s a lot more, but you get the picture.

The insurance company denied reimbursing my clients for my services because I don’t hold a CNA (or LPN or RN) certificate.

I was incredulous… “You’d rather have someone with no experience who happens to have just graduated from CNA training than someone with my background?”. Well, yes. (By the way, in Maine one can get a CNA with 180 hours of training… that’s 4 1/2 weeks.)

He paid out of pocket until his wife passed.

It’s the same situation with another, current, client.

One might say, well, you should have medically-trained personnel on-site. And my clients have had such – hospice care. But hospice doesn’t provide the kind of intensive or round the clock care that end of life doulas or even just very good care-givers can provide. And if the family wants their person to be able to live out his or her last days in their own home, rather than a nursing home, shouldn’t that be taken into consideration?

After all, how many people want to go to a nursing home, which often can be filled with noise and chaos, where the atmosphere is sterile, and there’s a strong possibility of developing an iatrogenic disease (one actually created by a hospital/medical environment).

Worse, according to JAMA (Journal of the American Medical Association), the amount of personal attention one receives in a nursing facility averages less than three hours per day! (“The mean hours-per–resident-day were 0.41 for RNs and 2.16 for CNAs. *JAMA. Daily Variation in Nursing Home Staffing and Its Association With Quality Measures, March 05, 2022.)

Growing old can be a very expensive proposition. If you’re paying for long term care insurance, please go over the policy very carefully to see what it will pay for and what it won’t.

For another good article on the topic, check out the following: