Do Californians have LTCI? Many are unsure

By Allison Bell

July 16, 2015 at 11:45 AM

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Consumers who have private long-term care insurance (LTCI) may be forgetting what they used to know about their coverage.

Analysts at the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research found evidence of growth in consumer confusion about LTCI coverage this spring, when they conducted a long-term care (LTC) planning awareness telephone survey for the SCAN Foundation. Survey workers took information from 460 adult California residents ages 40 and older.

The same team conducted a similar LTC planning awareness survey for the SCAN Foundation a year earlier.

The percentage of survey participants who said they have private LTCI, or "extra insurance that covers expenses of ongoing living assistance," held steady at 16 percent.

But the percentage of participants who said they had private LTCI, and were certain that they had private LTCI, fell to 70 percent, from 83 percent.

The percentage who said they were very unsure about whether they had private LTCI increased to 17 percent, from 10 percent.

This year, for the first time, the survey team gave participants a chance to say they had private LTCI, and later to confess if they did not really know whether they had LTCI. About 4 percent of the participants said they had private LTCI, and then acknowledged that they did not know whether they had LTCI.

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