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Many U.S. life insurers have been moving toward more sales of long-term care (LTC) benefits added to life insurance policies or annuity contracts, and away from sales of stand-alone long-term care insurance (LTCI) policies.
One question has been: Do the LTC hybrid products really produce better results for the issuers than stand-alone LTCI policies, or do the hybrid products simply free protection against long-term care risk from being associated with a product type that's out of favor?
Actuaries from Milliman Inc. have looked at a few years of early experience data from 11 hybrid issuers and found that the early results look good.
(Related: Life-LTC Hybrid Sales Soar: LIMRA)
The likelihood that hybrid purchasers will actually claim LTC benefits early on is lower than what the issuers included in their pricing assumptions, Milliman said Thursday, in an announcement of the release of the new analysis.
The actual-to-expected ratio is much lower than the claim assumptions that would be used to calculate prices for stand-alone LTCI, according to Milliman.
