Secure Your Future: Navigating Long-Term Care Insurance Eligibility Challenges with Confidence
Most cost, most hope It’s tempting to view long-term care insurance as a light that draws us to shore in the midst of rough and dangerous waters. But are we seeing things too clearly? I’ve written a lot about long-term care insurance (you can find everything I’ve written about it here), and that is because it is so important. But I’ve also fallen into its hidden traps. So let’s go down to the murky bottom and look at the dark side. What are the disqualifications for long-term care insurance?Pre-existing conditions – past health problems – become ghosts. Scream to the insurance adjuster: ‘Why are you denying me? It was three years ago!’ It’s like you built a good ship and no one told you it’s barred from ports!
Age limits themselves, the most indisputable and transgressive of ironies, might disqualify you when you need it most! After you’d lived two centuries, wouldn’t it be absurd to deny you long-term care coverage on the basis of your age? It would be like being denied a seatbelt because you’re too likely to get into a crash!
Financial disqualifications are bitter pills to swallow, but with these it could catch you out nonetheless through all your planning. Most will kick in only when the money is ‘in your hands … within the control of [the] person’. And that can mean it is available, not just for your long-term benefit, but to be taken if you find yourself nearing the jobseeker threshold. Imagine building up a nest-egg for old age, only to find when you come to draw on it that it is disqualifying. Imagine stores for your journey, but you can’t even get on the ship – because you are too rich!
Now the small print… Here, among the arcane clauses that could sink your prospects of being covered, do not neglect to locate and examine the ones that might ruin your day if it ever came to use. You’re unlikely to be fully covered if you decide to go for a swim.
Knowing the disqualifications puts you in a position to sail past the reefs of long-term care. Avoid being shipwrecked by exclusions you didn’t realise were coming; steer your own path through life with the insurance coverage you need to face the waves.
And that’s the point of our discussion about long-term care insurance. Its disqualifications are the reefs of the insurance world hidden below the surface. But with the knowledge you’ve gained from this article, you don’t have to worry about wrecking your wrinkled frame on them. Positive winds to you on setting sail into your golden years, dear reader!
