Insuring Long-Term Care in the United States
Name
Finkelstein_Insuring Long.pdf
Size
590.62 KB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
a4fe9a1d6d12a7e9eab3180b324c8010
Author(s)
Finkelstein, Amy
Brown, Jeffrey R.
Date Issued
January 2011
Journal
Journal of Economic Perspectives
Publisher
American Economic Association
Citation
Brown, Jeffrey R, and Amy Finkelstein. “Insuring Long-Term Care in the United States.” Journal of Economic Perspectives 25.4 (2011): 119–142. Web. 1 June 2012.
Version
Final published version
Abstract
Long-term care expenditures constitute one of the largest uninsured financial risks facing the elderly in the United States and thus play a central role in determining the retirement security of elderly Americans. In this essay, we begin by providing some background on the nature and extent of long-term care expenditures and insurance against those expenditures, emphasizing in particular the large and variable nature of the expenditures and the extreme paucity of private insurance coverage. We then provide some detail on the nature of the private long-term care insurance market and the available evidence on the reasons for its small size, including private market imperfections and factors that limit the demand for such insurance. We highlight how the availability of public long-term care insurance through Medicaid is an important factor suppressing the market for private long-term care insurance. In the final section, we describe and discuss recent long-term care insurance public policy initiatives at both the state and federal level.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Economics
Terms of Use
Article is made available in accordance with the publisher's policy and may be subject to US copyright law. Please refer to the publisher's site for terms of use.
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1257/jep.25.4.119
