Yes I am still employed and have health insurance and other disability plans. Even Medicare covers the hospital/doctors and medicine. I look at LTC as nursing home/assisted living and home health care and hope I will have enough saved up for when I hit 85-95
my question was more addressing what happens if you are like my co-worker ..he fell off a ladder painting and broke his wrist and hip .. at age 55 he had a stroke during hip surgery . he was left paralyzed and in a nursing home ... his family was impoverished at this point at 114k a year for the home..so crap happens at younger ages too .
after much thought about self insuring we went with a ny state partnership plan .
we wanted it not so much for the 3 years insurance , even though a snf is 120k-140k a year in our area , we wanted it for the perks after the insurance ran out .
no shifting of assets , full asset protection , pretty much full income protection for the stay at home spouse , a special version of medicaid picks up the bills after the insurance runs out .
i mentioned in another thread , the fact that money magazine did a feature story on us years ago .
they wanted to put their team of pro's against me since i did all my own planning .
i wanted to self insure and they were against it for so many reasons . they were right .
those who say they are self insuring really have no plan . they hope they don't need care and they hope they have the funds .
but once the stay at home spouse goes in to survival mode those funds become a battle ground usually .
the issue with self insuring is that like any insurance :
you need the funds to cover you day 1 . you have to invest that insurance money in a safe and secure fashion . it can not just be thrown in the pool of money generating your income since that assumes it can always go to zero doing so .
to self insure properly means safe low returns on that money .
for just a small percentage of the gains from keeping our money invested normally we can pay for a full blown , inflation adjusted policy that covers 3 years in a snf or 6 years assisted living or in home care .
so we ended up going the policy route .
most of our attorney's work today is the self insurer's . they are scrambling at the last minute trying to preserve assets and to protect the income of their spouse .