Hudson Valley
Estate Planning

Secure Your Legend

The Coming Long-term Care Crisis

I say this without any hyperbole: America is facing a long-term care crisis.

The contributing factors to this crisis are voluminous: Americans are living longer; families are stretching geographically (Do you live in New York while parents live in Florida? Me too.); nursing home and in-home care costs for seniors have exploded; and many care providers are unreliable. Combined, these factors create a care and cost burden too great for most families to bear.

Recently, The New York Times ran a series masterfully highlighting the miserable state of long-term care nationwide. A paragraph in one of the articles leapt off the screen at me: “Only 3 to 4 percent of Americans 50 and older pay for a long-term care policy, according to LIMRA, an insurance marketing and research association. That stands in stark contrast to federal estimates that 70 percent of people 65 and older will need critical services before they die.”