Today on Beaconcast, a news site serving Roswell, GA, there was an opinion piece that revolves around the premise that the long term care crisis is no longer pending; it is upon us.  Now.  With recent front page stories in the Wall Street Journal and many other papers around the country starting to hone in on the crisis, the hope is that consumers will begin to pay closer attention to long-term care and their future needs.

With recent Medicaid cutbacks, some nursing homes are no longer making a profit.  One example raised in the article was a home in Troy, Michigan, where the home was losing about $25 per day per resident.  Those numbers cannot go on, but things are being pinched from all directions.  And even worse in this case: the state required an extra nurse be added per shift, at a cost of over $100,000.  So the states, those lovely darlings, are simultaneously cutting funding and raising the cost of care.  Fantastic.

Long term care insurance is the only way out of this crisis.  Legislators and insurance companies need to come together now more than ever in order to come up with viable solutions for a long-term project that will both encourage consumers and protect them at the same time, fostering the sale of long-term care insurance.