We’re generally not one for puns in legislative bills because it tends to demean the actual language contained within. But it’s easy to put that aside when you consider what the CLASS act could entail for a lot of seniors and their families.

Medicare and Medicaid tend to cover many seniors’ health care needs, but the rules about home care and specialized services like assisted living tend to require more paperwork and a few more headaches. The layers of bureaucracy weren’t helping, and the act that slipped into the health care reform bill could do a lot to change that.

What is the Class Act?
The CLASS Act (Community Living Assistance Services and Support Act) is a voluntary, federally administered, consumer-financed insurance plan. It provides a benefit of $50 to $75 per day to start, or rather it will when the details are hammered out. It works like private long-term care insurance does, or social security deductions. You enroll in the program when you’re younger, and the payments come when you start to lose some of your faculties.

The benefits begin after you’ve been in the CLASS program for five years, and there aren’t any restrictions or benefits limitations. That’s the good news. Bad news comes when you realize that it may be a little while before the program is instituted, so this is more of a long-term idea, or for families where aging parents or relatives are in independent living facilities but may need assistance further down the line.

The math works out well, though. A benefit of $50 per day works out to $18,250 on an annual basis, or $1,520 per month. While that may not seem like very much, it’s in the middle of common costs at assisted living facilities for residents. Since many seniors may not require extensive care like that found in a nursing home, this makes the cost much easier to bear for them and their families.

It also brings up a more important issue. The bill’s sponsors argued that some disabilities or difficulties can occur very rapidly to seniors, placing a lot of burden on rapidly adapting to new and potentially uncomfortable situations. Even so, many families do not have long-term care insurance policies in place, although the costs of dementia care and nursing homes can be high.

Perhaps the biggest benefit of the CLASS act, then, will be to help families budget for the future. It provides cheaper benefits to those who enroll when they are younger to reward their foresight. Even if you don’t want to consider a government plan for you or your family, you may want to take a look at long-term care insurance plans that are still on the private market. In spite of industry concerns that the moderate plan would take customers away, there is a gap between the costs of some facilities and the benefits provided by the new program.

Tags: class act, Health Care Reform, long term care insurance

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 4th, 2010 at 2:28 pm and is filed under Assisted Living Concerns, Paying for Assisted Living. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.