In the past two years the Special Committee on Aging has held thirteen hearings addressing long-term care. It’s an important topic that impacts all age categories. According to statistics compiled by the federal government, sixty percent of those who reach age 65 will need long-term care, and forty percent of people receiving long term care services are working age adults between the ages of 18 and 64.

A one year stay in a nursing home can cost anywhere from $35,000 to $100,000 (in Boise the average is $49,000 a year) – and the average stay is about two and a half years. Medicaid, the federal-state partnership program, now pays most nursing home costs for people with limited income and assets. But with the baby boom generation quickly aging, a recent report by the Special Committee on Aging calls the present Medicaid-dominated funding approach to long- term care "unsustainable." (Read the report.)

The reality is that too many seniors have to bankrupt themselves in order to qualify for Medicaid. We simply cannot continue down this path and to help correct this problem, I have introduced S. 2199, the "Long-Term Care Insurance Partnership Program Act of 2002.”

My legislation would allow an individual to purchase a long-term care insurance policy approved by a state government, and in return, the state would guarantee that should the policy benefits be exhausted, the government would cover the costs of their continuing care through Medicaid. For the individual, such "partnership policies" allow them to protect their assets without having to go into bankruptcy, and for state governments, such efforts should help them reign in skyrocketing Medicaid expenditures.

The long-term care legislation I’ve introduced is modeled after programs presently working in four states - California, Connecticut, Indiana, and New York. As this is written, out of 66,000 policies currently in force, only 28 policyholders to date have exhausted their long-term care insurance benefits and accessed the joint federal-state Medicaid assistance program. The National Governor's Association has expressed its support for expanding such programs nationwide – expansion which is currently prohibited by federal law.

In addition to my legislative efforts, I am encouraging federal employees and retirees to review a new program which allows them to purchase long-term care insurance at group rates. The Federal Long Term Care Insurance Program was passed into law in 2000 and is available to nearly 20 million federal workers and retirees nationally. About 23,000 people in Idaho - both current federal employees and those retired from federal service, and their families – may be eligible for the new program.

This new effort is hopefully the beginning of a new way of planning ahead and will hopefully serve as a model for private industry and associations. It's just like any other insurance - you hope you'll never need it, but it could offer great protection you, your family, and your assets.

You may be interested to note that the Health Insurance Association of America estimates that by 2000, the latest year for which numbers are available, there were six million long-term care policies in effect - covering less than three percent of the nation's 287 million people.