Friedberg, Leora, Wenliang Hou, Wei Sun, and Anthony Webb. “Long-term care”. Issue in Brief 14-18, Chestnut Hill, Mass.: Center for Retirement Research at Boston College, November 2014. http://hdl.handle.net/2345/bc-ir:103770.
Abstract
The brief's key findings are: (1) Long-term care is expensive, but only 13 percent of single individuals over 65 have long-term care insurance. (2) Previous models of care usage appear to understate the risk of going into care and overstate the duration of care for those who require it. (3) If long-term care is a more likely, but less expensive, event, fewer people may benefit from insurance than previously estimated. (4) Our analysis shows that it is optimal for only about 20-30 percent of single individuals to buy insurance. (5) This result strengthens the finding of previous research that Medicaid crowd-out can explain why most households do not buy insurance.
