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Partnership Program for long-term care insurance: the right model for addressing uncertainties with the future?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 July 2015

SAVANNAH BERGQUIST ,
JOAN COSTA-FONT  and
KATHERINE SWARTZ
SAVANNAH BERGQUIST
Affiliation:
PhD student, Health Policy Program, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA.
JOAN COSTA-FONT
Affiliation:
European Institute, Department of Social Policy, London School of Economics, UK.
KATHERINE SWARTZ*
Affiliation:
Department of Health Policy and Management, Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health, Boston, Massachusetts, USA.
*
Address for correspondence: Katherine Swartz, Department of Health Policy and Management, Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health, 677 Huntington Ave., Boston, MA 02459, USA E-mail: kswartz@hsph.harvard.edu
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Abstract

Public policies that provide incentives for higher middle-income people to purchase private long-term care insurance (LTCI) have been proposed as a way to shield large numbers of middle-income people from the risk of needing costly long-term care. A proposal to promote purchases of private LTCI that has gained modest traction in the United States of America is the Partnership Program. The structure and public–private nature of the Partnership Programs are reviewed along with the trends in sales of both regular private LTCI policies and Partnership LTCI policies to show that both experienced low purchase rates. Implementation efforts for the Partnership Programs were very modest, in part because many were launched when the Affordable Care Act was passed. At the same time, several well-known insurers withdrew from selling private LTCI. Understanding why the Partnership Program is not a success provides lessons for other counties interested in creating similar public–private ventures.

Keywords

long-term care insurancelong-term carePartnership ProgramsMedicaid crowd-out
Type
Forum Article
Information
Ageing & Society , Volume 36 , Issue 9 , October 2016 , pp. 1779 - 1793
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 

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