Long-Term Care Insurance

durasupreme

Is anyone out there offering this voluntary benefit to their employees? If yes, what has been the response? If no, why not? We are a manufacturing facility of ~525 ee's, so I'm especially interested in responses from the manufacturing world.

hrwoman

WE are a manufacturing facility w/ about 150 employees at our location. We currently offer supplemental benefits (STD, LTD and Life) to all of our employees. These are 100% employees paid but are offered to them at group rates. The majority of our employees partcipate in them.

basketballmom

We are a newspaper business. We started offering long term care in 1999. We had tremendous success with this with over 40% participation which is almost unbelievable. We selected a program that had 3 base plans ($2000, $3000, and $4000) and then enhancements you could add to each base plan such as inflation protection, home care, etc. Of course each enhancement had an additional cost to it so there actually was a total of 12 different scenarios employees could pick from. The formula for computing the cost of each scenario that the underwriter provided in their informational brochure was confusing and I knew most employees would just give up on it and decline the insurance. For example, the underwriter based everything on the $2000 base plan and a monthly rate. So if an employees actually was trying to price the $4000 plan at a biweekly rate they had to add this and multiply that and then annualize and divide to eventually come up with a biweekly rate. So I had our IT department design a program that computed what each scenario would cost each individual based on their age. I then prepared an individual enrollment form for each person. They could then see in black and white what it would cost instead of trying to compute it from the formula. Employees could then pick the plan that fit with their budget. They also could see that it was very economical. In fact the underwriter liked the method so much they started using it. I am a real believer in long term care and really promote it at our place of business. Hope this helps. By the way, we have a 40 year old that has been diagnosed with an incurable disease and is applying for her long term benefits. She is so thankful we offered this and she signed up!!

E Wart

We are also a manufacturing company of about 200+ employees. We do not offer it, but I have been asking our broker to give us a proposal on this.
I brought this coverage in at my prior employers (and used UNUM). It was a huge sucess. I urge employees to consider this because it is so inexpensive while you are younger. Also, our plan was portable, so I took mine with me when I left. At the enrollment time, you could get the coverage for spouse as well. They also allowed parents to come in the plan and be billed direct and get our rates for the initial enrollment period.
I would say offer this and be a hero (or at least a good person.)
Ellen
E Wart