Actuaries at Milliman are starting to look into how the COVID-19 pandemic is affecting couples' need for long-term care.
The actuaries will be analyzing long-term care insurance (LTCI) claim data to see how a COVID-19 case leading to use of long-term care, or death, in one spouse affects the odds that the other spouse will use long-term care.
Milliman — a Seattle-based actuarial consulting firm — discusses the research project in the first issue of a new Long Term Care Focus newsletter.
The actuaries cite an earlier Milliman analysis of "spousal contagion," drawing from a pool of 50,000 private LTCI claims, showing that, before the COVID-19 pandemic came along, the death or need for formal long-term care in one spouse correlated with a dramatic increase in the odds that the other spouse will need long-term care.
