How Does Ohio Respond to Increasing Demand for Long Term Care?

The Genworth Financial conducted a study of the statewide costs of care in some key cities of Ohio. According to data, the average annual cost of a nursing home in Ohio is $74,825 for a private bedroom while $67,890 for a semi-private room, these rates are less expensive than the national average. Long term care can be either medical or non-medical, and these services can be administered at home or nursing home facilities. Families in Ohio that stick with the traditional home care have average expenses of $42,328 for Medicare-certified home health aide, while those in assisted living facilities spend around $39,330.

Long term care services roughly batter people to debt and, worse, poverty.   Elders are protecting their assets that they can pass along their heirs, but it could suddenly be depleted as long term care costs rise.  People who are not insured are obliged to shoulder all long term care expenses, unless their assets are low enough to qualify for Medicaid assistance. An individual must have $1,500 worth of assets and couples with $2,250 to become eligible for Medicaid program in Ohio.

Ohio Long Term Care Insurance Partnership Program

On September 1, 2007, the Ohio Revised Code 5111.18 petitioned the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services and several departments such as the Department of Insurance and the Department of Aging to conduct partnership with insurance companies in Ohio. This program was called the Ohio’s Partnership for Long Term Care Insurance. Its goal is to encourage Ohioans to purchase affordable long term care policies to finance their health needs in the future.

Partnership Policy Features

The main selling point of the partnership policy is the asset protection benefit. This feature is not developed to lure people from purchasing policies and increase sales; the primary goal of this is to protect potential policyholders from losing their assets when applying for Medicaid assistance. Everyone can benefit from Medicaid without exhausting his or her benefits. The asset protection or disregard uses dollar-for-dollar model wherein every dollar that a person receives from policy benefits is the amount of dollar that he or she can protect from Medicaid. An individual’s assets are protected regardless of the amount Medicaid sets for eligibility. Through this, Medicaid has no control over how much assets a person wishes to keep, unless the person does not comply with the partnership rules. Thus, if the partnership policy doles out $300,000 for long term care benefits and services, an individual can still keep the same amount of assets or even more and still qualify for Medicaid eligibility. Private insurance policies purchased on or after August 12,2002 can be converted to partnership policies.

The second feature that is included in all long term care partnerships is the inflation protection minimums. The amount of inflation protection varies on the age of policyholder at the time of purchase. Policyholders aged 60 and below at the time of purchase are entitled for 3% minimum inflation benefit. Otherwise, policyholders above 76 years have the option to include inflation protection in the policy benefits.

Third feature is the reciprocity agreement. This allows partnership policyholders to continue the benefits when they move to other states. However the state the person has moved in shall comply with the reciprocity agreement to obtain the benefits of the partnership policy purchased in Ohio.

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