Understanding Everything About Long Term Care

How much do you know about long term care? This is not a rhetoric question but an honest one because you need to know the long term care glossary by heart for three reasons: One is for you to be able to come up with an effective long term care (LTC) plan, second is to avoid being short-changed by an insurance company and third is to avoid abuse in the hands of your LTC provider.

Practically speaking, you need to be familiar with all the terms that are used in the LTC industry before you can plan reasonably. While you’re young, healthy and in the process of starting your future health care plan, take time to read and analyze commonly used words in the LTC industry which you will find in financial books, medical dictionaries, or simply on the website of a long term care insurance (LTCI) agency.

Do not be satisfied with the word long term care or its accepted acronym LTC as this will only lead you to LTC planning procrastination. If you put so much weight on these three words you’ll keep identifying it with senior citizens. Unfortunately, this is not how the dictionary defines it.

According to an LTC dictionary, long term care refers to an array of services provided to individuals who are chronically ill, disabled, injured, or too weak to function normally resulting from old age. LTC may be provided in one’s home, in an institutional LTC facility such as a nursing home or in a community-based LTC facility like an assisted living.

Why Study the Long Term Care Glossary

Don’t wait to wake one day realizing that you’re too old to plan your LTC so you’ll just entrust your estate to the government. Nothing can be more pathetic than that.

If only you take time to study the terminology that is used in the long term care industry, you will be able to understand why you have to start planning your LTC at a very young age.

You’ll find in an LTC dictionary the term inflation protection which means a type of rider or add-on which can be integrated into an LTCI policy to increase its initial maximum daily benefit amount so that it keeps pace with inflation.

The word inflation is the reason people are encouraged to plan their LTC needs. Inflation keeps the cost of care going up so if you don’t work out a plan early on in your life, you risk losing all of your money and other assets.

You may think that you will never require LTC but once you stumble upon the term Activities of Daily Living or ADL, which means the ordinary day-to-day activities like eating, bathing, dressing, and using the toilet, and then you find out that people eventually lose the ability to perform all these as they age you might just change your mind about LTC.

Other important terms which you need to look up in the long term care glossary are custodial care or personal care, skilled care, and free look period among others.