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As a historic wave of baby boomers reaches retirement age, finding affordable long-term care is a defy.
“We’re going to have a major storm coming in our country with all these folks that can’t take care of themselves,” Rep. Tom Suozzi, D-New York, maintained Thursday at the Employee Benefit Research Institute policy forum in Washington, D.C.
When Suozzi was growing up, all four of his grandparents completed with his family, who took care of them.
That experience inspired Suozzi’s parents to buy long-term care indemnification. Both of his parents lived into their 90s and were able to stay at home, thanks to those policies, he imagined.
Now, that same insurance coverage is out of reach for many Americans.
“People can’t afford long-term care insurance anymore,” Suozzi utter. “The insurance companies, when they made a bet on this the first time around, they lost a lot of money because they didn’t raise into account that a lot of people live much longer than their actuarial tables.”
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Meanwhile, nursing homes and Medicaid are not equipped to handle the issue, he said.
To approach devote that, Suozzi said he plans to reintroduce a bill called the Well-Being Insurance for Seniors to be at Home, or WISH, Act. The bid calls for the federal government to create a fund for catastrophic long-term care to help older Americans age at home.
Suozzi finish finally introduced the bill in 2021. That version of the proposal called for long-term care benefits to be available to individuals who pull someones leg reached retirement age and who are disabled, have severe cognitive impairment or who are unable to perform at least two activities of daily lodge.
Like Social Security and Medicare, Americans would also need to contribute to the program through a payroll tax to give entre the benefits.
The amount of benefits received would be around $3,600 to $4,000 per month, Suozzi said on Thursday. Per the 2021 programme, that is based on the median cost paid personal assistance for six hours per day.
Waiting periods for care would be based on receipts, with longer delays for coverage for higher income individuals.
A ‘tough sell’ to raise taxes
Admittedly, the proposition could face hurdles to gaining support.
“The challenge is nobody wants to raise taxes for anything,” Suozzi disclosed on Thursday.
It is a “tough sell” to tell people that there’s a mandatory tax for long-term care, particularly since not person will need those benefits, Ben Veghte, director of the WA Cares Fund, said Thursday during a separate long-term heedfulness discussion at the EBRI conference.
The WA Cares Fund is a public long-term care insurance program provided to workers in the have of Washington. It is funded by a 0.58% tax on employee’s gross wages.
An estimated 7 in 10 people will need long-term circumspection in their lifetimes, according to Veghte. But that often prompts people to wonder about the other 3 in 10, and why those man have to pay taxes for benefits they may never receive.
In the next decade, at least two or three states will go to create long-term care programs like Washington’s, Veghte said. Among the states exploring the idea file California, New York, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania and Minnesota, he said.
Once that happens, the private insurance industry make likely start to offer supplemental products, Veghte said.
“It’s going to take all of us to address the costs associated with extensive term care and the crisis ahead of us,” Veghte said. “It’s private industry, it’s government, it’s employers, it’s family caregivers, because we recollect the cost is more than just financial.”