One of the big reasons people buy long-term care insurance is to avoid burdening a spouse or grown children when they can no longer care for themselves.
But some family members are shouldering another type of burden: one that involves piles of paperwork and repeated phone calls, as they are forced to navigate a labyrinth of requirements to collect benefits that the insured spent many years paying.
“There is no possible way an elderly person who is ill and needs help can possibly do this work,” said Fiona Havlish, who coordinated her father’s home care in Pottstown, Pa., before he died last year, a week after his 90th birthday. “It took six to eight weeks to get the insurance into place, and this was working on it every single day. It was an incredible amount of work.”
Ms. Havlish, a former nurse who now works as a life coach in Boulder, Colo., said she first had to find a home care agency that was not only covered by the long-term care policy but one that she felt comfortable entrusting with her father’s care. Later, she had to follow up continually with the aides and doctors to make sure they were filing the proper paperwork so that they insurer would pay. “Three months after he was gone,” she added, “I was still fighting with them over paper.”
At least the bill for her father’s care was eventually paid. In other cases, families have had to fight to overturn denials, and have gone as far as hiring lawyers to file suit. Many Americans now in their 80s and 90s who are collecting benefits — or trying to — bought their policies decades ago when the policies were more restrictive than now. On top of that, many insurers have since left the business after mispricing the policies and failing to judge the economics of the industry, which has made collecting payments even more difficult.
“Everything is not rosy,” said Jesse Slome, director of the American Association for Long Term Care Insurance. “When insurers stop selling or exit the business, many of them hire these third-party administrators to adjudicate claims and that is where interpretations don’t seem to be as liberal.”
Insurance agents who have specialized in long-term care policies for a couple of decades, however, told me that most of the top-rated insurers pay claims without issue. And clearly, claims worth billions are paid each year: An estimated 264,000 people received long-term care benefits at the end of 2012, according to Mr. Slome, and $6.6 billion in benefits were paid that same year.
Still, “the process can be pretty daunting for people,” said Bonnie Burns, a policy specialist at California Health Advocates, an education and advocacy group.
If you need to file a claim on behalf of a loved one, it helps to know why claims are denied and where filers tend to get tripped up. Here’s what I gathered, from longtime brokers, consumer advocates and lawyers who do battle with insurers on these issues:
DEDUCTIBLES In the long-term care world, deductibles work a bit differently than typical insurance policies. The policies have waiting periods, or elimination periods, and they are typically measured in days: 30, 60, 90 or 100 days. So if your policy covers $150 a day for in-home care, and you have a 60-day waiting period, you will typically owe the first $9,000 — 60 times $150 a day — before the policy kicks in.
But the way the waiting periods are counted is critical, too. “If a person is getting home care a few days a week, and the company only counts those days of care toward the waiting period, the total time needed to satisfy the waiting period will be much longer than 60 days,” Ms. Burns said. “So it isn’t just the $9,000, but the total time that has to be satisfied.”
With certain older policies, meanwhile, the insured person must also spend three days in the hospital before the policy will pay any benefits. “Some of these older policies have requirements that most states don’t allow today,” Ms. Burns said. “But these requirements must still be met in these older policies.”
ELIGIBILITY To become eligible for benefits, patients must be expected to need “substantial assistance” for at least 90 days, either because they are suffering from a form of dementia, for instance, or because they can’t perform two basic daily activities from a list of six, including items like bathing, getting dressed and eating. (This applies to certain policies written after 1997.)
“What we are finding today is that when people are getting assessed, they fire on 8 or 10 cylinders on some days and they will trick people,” said Brian I. Gordon, president of MAGA, a long-term care insurance agency in Riverwoods, Ill. “They want to become Superman the day the assessor comes out. And then the insurer may deny the claims.”
Glenn R. Kantor, a lawyer in California whose firm focuses on insurance claims, said he represented a woman, blind from severe macular degeneration who was receiving benefits for home care. But when the representative from the insurer asked her if she could bathe by herself, the woman told the company she could as long as her aide led her into the shower and gave her soap and a washcloth. Shortly thereafter, the insurer cut off her payments.
Then, “they sent her to collections to get the money back,” Mr. Kantor said, because the caregiver was not within arm’s length but left the bathroom to go into the next room while the woman bathed. The insurance company settled, but the terms were confidential so Mr. Kantor could not divulge the insurer or the exact amount it paid.
LICENSED CAREGIVERS Depending on where a patient lives and the type of policy, a licensed caregiver for home care services will probably have to be hired (though some policies, known as cash plans, will let you spend the money with fewer restrictions and pay a grandchild or a neighbor for care, for instance). “If they are not licensed, those types of people may not be covered under most long-term care policies today,” Mr. Gordon said.
But that’s not the case everywhere. In California, for instance, the state insurance law prohibits insurers from imposing this requirement, Mr. Kantor said. “So we are seeing a number of people have their claim denied by the carrier saying your caregiver isn’t licensed.”
ASSISTED LIVING Many of the policies that benefit people today were written before assisted-living facilities came into vogue, experts said. So some families will find out that only a “skilled nursing facility” is covered. “Then you have the daughter wandering around the state with the contract trying to find a place that meets the policy’s requirements,” Ms. Burns added.
Mr. Gordon said that many carriers could still pay for assisted-living facilities as long as they met certain conditions, including being licensed by the state, providing care by a licensed doctor and 24-hour nursing services, among other items. Ultimately, however, it “may or may not be covered after the claim is submitted,” he added.
Even once you think you have found the right type of facility, be sure to read the fine print. Some policies will require that a facility have a nurse on duty 24 hours a day. “But some of them will have a nurse there for 12 hours and on call for 12 hours,” Mr. Gordon said. And if that’s the case, the coverage may be denied.
Mr. Slome, of the trade organization, said that many insurers did not anticipate the new types of facilities. And while he has heard insurance claims directors say that they don’t officially provide coverage, they will. “The squeaky gear gets the grease,” he added.
ALTERNATE PLAN OF CARE Some policies have provisions for what they call “alternate plans of care,” which experts said implied a certain degree of flexibility. “People read those and say, ‘Look, it says they will do this,’ ” said Ms. Burns. In reality, “they will consider something different, but the insurer makes the ultimate decision.”
Continental Casualty Company, a subsidiary of the CNA Financial Corporation, sold policies with a similar provision, which could potentially allow the insured to receive benefits for care, say, in the home instead of a nursing home, Mr. Kantor said. But since the CNA unit stopped selling the policies in 2003, he said they were making a habit of no longer honoring those provisions. “The insurance company is insistent that they have the right not to approve the plan,” said Mr. Kantor, who is representing a woman with Alzheimer’s disease whose request for an alternate plan was not even considered. “But it was not sold that way.”
A spokeswoman for CNA declined to comment on the specific case, but said “an alternate plan of care may be mutually agreed upon between CNA and the claimant. However, the alternate plan of care benefit was never intended to confer a general right to home health care that the optional rider provides.”
DOCUMENTATION For Ms. Havlish, the Pennsylvania woman who handled her father’s claims, documentation was one of the most frustrating parts of the process. “Every time the agency billed the insurance company, it would get sent back as not paid because they did not chart properly,” she said, referring to documentation kept by caregivers.
And some insurers have been known to deny claims on that basis. Harvey Rosenfield, a lawyer and founder of Consumer Watchdog, recently represented Dr. William Hall, a man who filed suit against Senior Health Insurance Company of Pennsylvania (formerly known as Conseco Senior Health Insurance Company) for failing to pay long-term care benefits for eight months. The insurer required an inordinate amount of forms and documents that were not referred to in or required by the policy, according to the lawsuit complaint. The two parties ultimately reached a settlement last month.
“With all of the hurdles, trying to get a claim paid can be like an Olympic event,” Mr. Rosenfield said. “The bottom line is that practices vary widely from company to company and state to state. And whether you can trust the company depends on regulation in that state — and most states have limited regulation.”
