Questions from our client about his long term care insurance quotes:

Noticing a lot of stories on the web about problems in the Long Term Care Insurance quotes industry … companies getting out of the business – and consumers being stuck with unexpected increases in their premiums (or being denied coverage based on the fine print of the agreements.) Do any of these firms offer more protection than others against price hikes later – or have a better track record at handling coverage requests?

LTC Tree answers:

In the past ten years Prudential and and Metlife are the two big long term care insurance quotes companies that got out but Transamerica along with a few others got back in.  There are still a ten or so blue-chip companies offering long-term care insurance quotes so I’d said consolidation might have happened.

The older companies that pioneered the LTC industry simply took higher risk people when they should not have done so in the 70’s, 80’s and 90’s.  Their actuaries were starting from zero and just had to see how it played out when pricing this stuff before they had much if any claims data to go on.  Hence the rate increase adjustment to old customers long-term care insurance quotes.

Fast forward to today and the long-term care insurance quote companies have gotten so much tighter with underwriting such as not taking diabetics, stricter height/weight rations, charging women more because they file 70% of claims, etc.  They also had no idea that the Fed would be manipulating interest rates for so long.  They thought they would be able to take premiums and buy 5% 10 year T-Bills but now they are paying just 1.7%.  They have corrected for a lot and the policies they are selling now will be much more stable than the past policies, plus they are charging way more than they use to.

Our opinion is Mass Mutual has an advantage in that they are a mutual company and they tend to be more stable and conservative, they have the highest ratings and lastly, they started selling in the year 2000 after a lot of the actuarial assumptions were beginning to be learned.  Simply put, they don’t have near the amount of toxic policies on their books because they were not selling it back when things first stated in 1974.   They also have never had a rate increase too.   This stability could lead to their long term care insurance quotes being much more stable over time.  This company found here is another broker type company that you might want to look at if you find yourself wanting to shop for a policy.