Manulife May Up Prices on In-Force LTC

"We've also introduced additional universal life product designs to reduce the duration of the secondary guarantees," Bell said.

The decline in results for its U.S business is partly due to higher new business costs and to losses on LTC policies, Bell said.

Bell said the company is conducting a new morbidity study on existing LTC insurance business because claims on these older policies have been higher than expected. This has been especially true for LTC contracts sold "many years ago, where plan designs tended to be richer and underwriting less stringent," Bell said.

"We still need to complete our analysis of how we expect this to project out in future years. And after we complete the morbidity study, we expect to develop a state-by-state in-force rate increase plan and then file for these rate increases. We will then make judgments about the net impact of the increase in projected future morbidity, minus the projected value of the in-force rate increases."

Bell declined to state when Manulife would make its decision on in-force LTC rates, saying only that the company still has "a lot of work to do" before it completes its morbidity study.