New York Life offers high daily coverage limits, money-back guard
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Long-term care insurance covers services like hospice care, respite care, stays in assisted living facilities, nursing care, physical therapy, and help with personal care, such as bathing and dressing. The best long-term care insurance comes from reputable companies with high ratings and positive reviews. It comes with competitive prices, multiple types of coverage, and discounts. Some insurers also don’t require elimination periods.
New York Life is our choice for the best long-term care insurance because of its variety of plans, flexible care options, and money-back guarantee. To determine the top insurers, we evaluated them based on financial strength, coverage types, policies, pricing, discounts, and other factors.
Many adults need long-term care as they get older. Someone turning the age of 65 today has nearly a 70% chance of needing long-term care assistance in their lifetime, according to the Administration for Community Living.
We analyzed coverage prices to find the best long-term care insurance policies.
What Is Long-Term Care Insurance?
Long-term care (LTC) insurance is a policy that covers expenses related to long-term care. Most LTC insurance policies cover services like adult day care, hospice, nursing home stays and help with activities of daily living (ADLs), like dressing and eating.
The average cost of a private room in a nursing home is $7,698 a month and a home health aide costs more than $20 an hour on average, according to the Association for Community Living (ACL).
Having an LTC insurance policy can dramatically reduce what you have to pay for long-term care.
Stand-alone long-term care insurance isn’t widely available anymore. Only about a dozen private insurance providers offered long-term care insurance policies in 2020 and that number has dwindled even more over the past two years. The American Association for Long Term Care Insurance (AALTCI) says only six companies currently sell standard long-term care insurance policies:
- Bankers Life
- Mutual of Omaha
- National Guardian Life
- New York Life
- Northwestern Mutual
- Thrivent
Types of Long-Term Care Insurance
There are multiple ways to get long-term care insurance.
- Stand-alone long-term care insurance policy: This type of coverage provides only long-term care insurance. You can generally add an inflation rider that increases benefits over the years, such as by 3% or 5%. Putting that rider on a LTC policy will likely increase your cost since it bumps up the policy’s value.
- Linked benefit life insurance: A combination life insurance policy, also called a hybrid life insurance policy, is life coverage combined with long-term care insurance. Using the policy for LTC services reduces the death benefit. If you don’t need LTC, your survivors get the full death benefit when you die.
- Life insurance policy with LTC rider: You can often buy life insurance coverage with a long-term care rider. Life insurance riders don’t typically offer as much coverage as a hybrid life insurance/LTC policy, but is likely more affordable than a hybrid policy.
- Critical illness insurance: Critical illness insurance can be used to to pay for long-term care if you’re diagnosed with a specific illness that’s listed in the policy, such as cancer or a heart attack. These types of policies pay a lump sum, such as $25,000 or $30,000. Critical illness policies don’t continue to pay over a benefits period, like LTC insurance does, so they don’t offer as much coverage as other options.