Description: A summary of concerns about the Community Living Assistance Services and Supports Act, including flaws in the underlying premises, opportunism, inadequate sales incentives, insufficient benefits, adverse selection, and cashflow and solvency issues.

Description: This article summarizes the presentations by the Society of Actuaries and the Academy of Actuaries at the January 2015 National Academy of Social Insurance (NASI) Roundtables in Washington DC. SOA presented on the 2014 SOA monograph series "The Link between Retirement Security and Long-Term Care."

Description: Catastrophic Shared Stop-Loss: Adapting Life Insurance to Meet Long-Term Care Needs

Description: Many Americans will need long term care in future years, yet only 10 percent of those 50 and over have LTC insurance, and public programs are not funded to provide care for all who need it. The Long Term Care Section and the Forecasting and Futurism Section have co-sponsored a Delphi study, code named “Land This Plane,” with a lofty objective: to create a vision for how America ought to deal with the impending Long Term Care crisis. This article describes the results of the study that were available at the time this article was written.

Description: Combo long-term care insurance products provide a viable option for the insurance industry to offer a sufficient range and supply of private long-term care financing solutions.

Description: Discussion of the implications of the newly unveiled health care reform proposal by Senator Baucus. Key issues include abandonment of the CLASS Act, inclusion of LTC in cafeteria plans, funding and tax concerns, individual mandate, privacy concerns, play-or-pay employer mandate, impact on Medicare and Medicaid, and gridlock in the legislative finalization process.

Description: A comment letter to policymakers produced jointly by the SOA and AAA presents findings from their actuarial analysis of the proposed CLASS Act. The analysis indicates that the proposed structure and funding approaches will be unsustainable, and will cover only a very small proportion of the intended population. The opt-out and guaranteed issue provisions of the plan pose a risk that soon the program will either need increased premiums and/or significant reductions.

Description: This issue wraps up the publication of essays to explore solutions available to address risks in retirement and focus on risks in a DC environment.

Description: Protecting oneself in older age from risks is the sine qua non of retirement planning. But far too many people don’t approach retirement (or retirement planning) well. From a policy perspective, we know about half the senior population will have some sort of long-term care event. We need to recognize that long-term care risk is a component not just of aging but of retirement. Placing long term care solutions in the retirement space is critical to reaching the bulk of the population. Combined with the additional element—recognition of risk—this would be both a powerful protection but also a natural one for individuals to understand.

Description: An interview with Dawn Helwig on developments in the Long Term Care market.