My family has me covered , think many who pass over the topic of long-term care insurance. Or, perhaps, those who pass over the opportunity to buy this insurance, will rationalize that it can’t happen to me . As a result, should a debilitating condition ever set in, such as cancer, or a denegerative muscle disease, those who failed to buy long-term care insurance will often find that their family simply isn’t capable due to work obligations or simple lack of medical ability to provide long-term care in the home.

In fact, over half the people who become afflicted with some form of major disease will find their new daily routine to require either waking up in a nursing home, or awaiting an assisted home-living individual to help them do tasks as simple as using the bathroom or getting out of bed.

Care giving assurances for individuals who need long term care is more than it seems. Often it’s given by family and friends who have no real experience. Everything of each day in severe cases requires supervision. From eating, to changing diapers, to picking dead weight (imagine a small framed elderly lady lifting her 250 pound grown husband off the floor nearly daily?), to every other activity, these people could benefit from having insurance.

Long-term care insurance provides for the prevention of many of the problems of keeping long-term care strictly in the family. LCI can help care givers avoid depression and significant medical problems related to less skilled care offerings to someone with a debilitating condition.

Long-term care insurance differs from long-term health care insurance. LHCI provides funds for the doctors, hospital bills, and medications necessary to mitigate the nature of severe conditions, whereas LCI is designed to pay for care-giving. Originally long-term care insurance was designed to pay for nursing homes, however over time it has grown in scope to also help pay for assisted-living and even in-home care, which is desirable for many people.

Even should you find yourself never suffering from a condition such as cancer or lupus or dystrophy, there is a fundamental truth that is ignored by people who fail to take advantage of long term care plans. That truth is: unless you outright die, you will continue to age until you do require long term care. And now is an unprecedented time of a population of baby boomers aging to the point of increasingly needing long term care. Within the next two to three decades, six million Americans will require some form of long term care.

Unfortunately, coupled with this is the failure of public health safety nets such as Medicaid. States simply are tapped to the breaking point and are cutting benefits and support for those who have put the most money adjusted for inflation into their own coffers. Our government has made it crystal clear for seniors, either get long-term care insurance, or be ready to dig in your pockets for some cash.

And longterm care insurance does not apply exclusively to those over the age of 60. As a matter of fact, nearly half of those who are in assisted living facilities are under the age of 45! The result: it’s time to get thinking about long term care insurance for Americans of every age.

Thankfully, there is a trend of increasing availability of LCI to Americans, and it is coming from the workplace. The vast majority of older Americans express an interest in utilizing LCI that is part-employer paid, and the availability of long-term care insurance in the workplace is becoming increasingly commonplace. If your employer doesn’t offer LCI, you could find additional employees who are interested in it’s institution, and then approach your employer to ask in a polite way. Often, employers simply haven’t thought about it or caught up with the times.

Back a few decades ago, long term care truly was a family affair, however this is the new America – a land of jobs requiring family members to move to other locations and dual income families. Simply put, the era of being taken care of as an employee who has put in their twenty years is dead. Pensions are dead. Wake up and get long-term care insurance.