As a company, IRONSHIELD has embraced the need to include long-term care insurance as part of an overall comprehensive benefit plan. This has brought us in touch with Canada’s most talented experts in the field. I had the pleasure of speaking with Jennifer Jacobs, a top long-term care insurance specialist, who had provided us with an excellent overview of what long-term care insurance encompasses.
Photo by: Alan Cleaver licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic
Today, I want to share with you Jennifer’s expertise. In Part 1, I will give a brief description of what long-term care insurance is and dispel some of the most common myths surrounding this type of insurance coverage. In Part 2, I will share some insight into the various plans available in the market today and talk about some of their pros and cons.
Long-term care insurance is something that people don’t tend to think about when they are young because they feel that there is no need to. This is precisely the first myth that I wish to dispel in today’s post. Until a while ago, I had never been injured and never thought that I would have to think about long-term care. But then, I was involved in a serious water skiing accident and suddenly, I found myself changing the way I thought about long-term care and how it would benefit my family.
The misconception on long-term care comes from our association of the term with long-term facilities, when in fact, the two are not related at all. A long-term care insurance policy is essentially a security tool that allows you to go through life with confidence in the event that you encounter a serious injury or a situation in which it hinders the daily activities of everyday life. This type of insurance coverage protects your entire financial plan and provides you with an added income that would help maintain the life choices of your household.
When we are young and involved in various activities, we never quite imagine the chances that we may be taking. We are logical and presume that the possibility of injuries is something that we don’t have to consider until we are much older. It is only when we do experience a potentially life-threatening situation that we realize the affects of our injury could be financially devastating. For example, you may require assistance with routine tasks while you are injured, and whether it is by hiring a service or reallocating the task to another family member, the action will affect your overall income in some way.
A long-term care insurance policy is simply an income benefit. By acting proactively and securing an insurance policy in place, you are giving yourself the protection you will need in the future. However, it is important to understand that long-term care insurance is not a replacement for disability insurance. The second myth that I want to dismiss is that a long-term care insurance policy would affect the other various plans you already have in place. This is not the case with this particular type of coverage. The difference with this policy is that it isn’t asking whether or not you can do your job; it is asking if you can live independently. There are very strong overlaps between long-term care and disability plans, but rest assured that you are able to collect on both.
The third myth that I want to discuss is what it means to be able to live independently. While long-term care is strictly about whether or not you need help with your daily living, there are a few criteria that must be met before a claim can be made. First of all, there is a short waiting period to prevent small claims, such as sprains or strains. This ensures that the policy is effective for more severe circumstances, such as fractures, recovery from surgery, and incidents that actually affect you for typically more than 30 days. Secondly, the long-term care insurance plan will provide you with the income no matter what injury you have or how it happened. The only restriction here is criminal acts, such as drug use and the like, for obvious reasons.
In short, the whole purpose of a long-term care insurance policy is to promote your life into the stable state in which you want to maintain it. This type of policy is so unique because it has an unlimited status on it, which means there is no limit on the number of times you can collect in your life time. An unlimited status makes the long-term care insurance plan absolutely one of a kind in the Canadian market today.
To ensure that you are protected financially in the event of a serious injury, don’t forget to check back for Part 2, in which I will discuss the various plans available, as well as a little bit more detail on what counts as being “physically dependent.” I will also talk about the pros and cons of these plans, and point out their most tempting features. I strongly advise you to take the initiative and learn more about securing this very beneficial insurance plan. Its long term effects will certainly prove to be most rewarding in the future.
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