A healthy, married couple can usually get better benefits by purchasing a long-term care policy on their own, rather than buying a group long-term care policy through their employer.
Individually-purchased long-term care policies usually offer:
- Preferred health discounts that save you as much as 25%, and
- Marital discounts that can save as much as 40%. (Marital discounts are even given for domestic partners, in most states).
Most group LTCi policies do not give any preferred health discounts. And group LTCi policies usually do not give any discounts for being married.
But the biggest disadvantage to watch out for is that group LTCi policies are usually NOT Partnership-qualified policies.
Now that 39 states have “LTC Partnership programs” you can protect your assets even if your long-term care policy runs out of benefits. Each dollar that your long-term care partnership policy pays out in benefits entitles you to keep a dollar of your assets if you ever need to apply for Medicaid services.
You do not have to buy an expensive “unlimited” long-term care insurance policy. You only need to buy an amount of long-term care insurance equal to the amount of assets you want to protect for yourself, your spouse or partner, and/or your heirs.
Even if an individually-purchased LTCi policy were to cost more than a comparable group LTCi policy, this special asset protection offered by the LTC Partnership programs is probably worth the cost.
But, again, individually-purchased LTCi policies are often less expensive and have better benefits than group LTCi policies (especially for healthy couples).
