Description: Read the October 2019 issue of Long-Term Care News published by the Long Term Care Section. Newsletters provide practical information for the working actuary, articles on trends that impact sections and news about section activities.

Description: Family caregivers are a critical link in providing long-term services and supports (LTSS), but they have significant unmet needs. To better support family caregivers, Congress authorized the Recognize, Assist, Include, Support, & Engage (RAISE) Family Caregivers Act in 2018 and created the RAISE Family Caregiving Advisory Council. The Council identified recommendations to serve as the backbone of a national strategy to improve the physical, emotional and financial well-being of family caregivers. A new report, "Asking Directions: Mapping a Course to Support Family Caregivers," identifies specific actions across a variety of players for meeting the Council’s recommendations. It summarizes insights from a year’s worth of strategy sessions and interviews with representatives of over 100 organizations. The report brings together thoughts on best practices and the most critical action steps from national and state organizations, county health providers, the direct care workforce, large and small employers, aging and disability organizations, faith-based groups, respite care providers and more. This article summarizes the research methods and key findings of the report and the work conducted by the Leading Age LTSS Center @UMass Boston and Community Catalyst’s Center for Consumer Engagement in Health Innovation.

Description: The SOA Research Institute Aging and Retirement Strategic Research Program and the Long-Term Care Insurance Section are pleased to make available a research report analyzing the need for informal caregiving and its impacts on employees, employers, and other stakeholders.

Description: Explore wellness programs and their effectiveness within the LTC industry by attending the Considerations for LTC Wellness Programs webcast. You will experience discussions about design tactics and evaluation processes for programs, as well as discovering ways to assist policyholders achieve a sustainable and equitable life. There will also be a conversation about the current regulatory environment as it relates to LTC wellness programs. This webinar will focus on subsets of insured populations that are high risk of claim in order to properly manage care decisions and ensure unfair bias is avoided. Learn how to test for unfair bias and determine best possibilities on how to guard against this when testing is unavailable.

Description: The Society of Actuaries Long Term Care Insurance and Health Sections are seeking researchers to author a primer on long-term care insurance wellness programs. The underlying motivation for this effort is to educate actuaries on these programs and provide a useful resource for understanding their benefits, structure and limitations.

Description: The article provides an overview of the federal tax treatment of long-term care insurance contracts, including a brief history of the tax treatment of long-term care insurance, the requirements that must be satisfied in order to be treated as qualified long-term care insurance under the Internal Revenue Code, and a brief discussion of qualified long-term care combination products and chronic and terminal illness accelerated death benefits offered under life insurance contracts.

Description: Chairperson of the LTC Section reflects on his three-year term on the LTC Section Council.

Description: Cognitive tests used in the long-term care insurance industry differ in cognitive domains tested, time required for testing, ease of test administration, sensitivity and specificity. Recently, new approaches to scoring or testing have improved test utility for screening for cognitive impairment.

Description: The Minnesota Cognitive Acuity Screen MCAS is a brief cognitive screen that has been validated to correctly identify mild to moderate cognitive impairment in 98.1 percent of all cases. The MCAS has been in use in the LTCI industry for more than five years, and has shown excellent results in reducing early cognitive claims.