Scott Olson, an insurance broker on Camano Island, Wash., who specializes in long-term care insurance, told me in an interview that several companies in addition to the one I mentioned, OneAmerica, offer hybrids of long-term care insurance and annuities. But as my article explained, the existing policies don’t have the natural hedge that’s built into the Warshawsky-Spillman-Murtaugh concept.
Likewise, some readers cited policies that combine life insurance with long-term care insurance. Those don’t have a natural hedge, either. The risks to the insurer are all loaded on one outcome: that the person will get sick and die young.
Long-term care insurance (coupled with longevity protection) is “an absolutely critical part of retirement planning,” but until recently it hasn’t been sufficiently available because many insurers that sold long-term care as a stand-alone product lost money by underpricing it, Chuck Goldman, a financial services adviser in Swampscott, Mass., told me. The number of long-term care policies sold annually fell more than 90 percent, to 57,000 in 2018 from 754,000 in 2002, according to a Treasury Department survey.
“There isn’t enough competition to make companies deliver the best products they can,” Goldman said. That clearly needs to change.
The Readers Write (About Other Things, Too)
I have a computer science background and spent many years with the ill-fated congressional Office of Technology Assessment. Regarding your newsletter on the regulation of artificial intelligence, I worry that, in the absence of an organization like the O.T.A., we are letting so-called “autonomous applications,” like Teslas, be made commercially available without really assessing their safety or looking at the broader social and policy questions. The trucking industry is talking about autonomous 18-wheelers barreling down our freeways, for God’s sake. Technologists, economists, psychologists, social scientists and ethicists need to put their expertise together. And, as you point out, it needs to be an international effort. Learning on the fly can be hazardous to our health.
Fred Weingarten
Annapolis, Md.
Quote of the Day
“Once the N.H.S. arrived, if you were poor and you got sick, you weren’t on your own anymore. You were in a crowded waiting room full of other sick people.”
— “Cunk on Britain,” Episode 4: “Twentieth-Century Shocks” (2018)
Image and article originally from www.nytimes.com. Read the original article here.