What Does Long Term Care Insurance Cover?

These are individual health insurance plans that are designed to offer you a helping hand when you’re no longer able to take care of yourself—because of a prolonged disability or illness.

Depending on the plan, Long Term Care Policies may or may not offer coverage for home healthcare, adult living care or other alternative health services. Long Term Care Plans typically include a variety of medical and general healthcare support services for those who have developed degenerative medical conditions (post stroke, etc.), a cognitive disorder (dementia, etc.) or a prolonged illness (cancer, etc.).

Long Term Can Cover Your Custodial Care Needs

Long Term Care won’t necessarily mean actual medical care; it can also mean what’s known as "custodial care." Custodial health care will involve providing you with the assistance you may need with activities as ordinary as climbing out of bed, using the bathroom, eating, getting dressed, etc.

If you’re healthy it’s pretty easy to take for granted the kinds of activities that an ADL Facility can provide care for. But if you or a loved one were stricken with a degenerative condition, those ordinary activities would simply be impossible, or nearly so, without professional assistance of one kind or another.

The type of chronic full-time care this requires can become prohibitively expensive. Long Term Care Insurance is designed to provide assistance with the burden that expense can become. Long Term Care is offered in a variety of settings—form nursing homes to your own home to an assisted living facility to adult day care centers.