"Obama health plan not likely to embrace long-term care"

If US citizens have been putting off getting long-term care insurance, should they delay it a bit longer, anticipating the new administration's health plan? "I wouldn't advise it," says Denise Gott, chairman of the board of LTC Financial Partners, one of the nation's insurance agencies. "Long-term care has never been a part of any candidate's overall health care reform proposal, and likely never will be," she adds.

Why not? "The country is split over the degree to which the government should be involved in our health care system, and this is reflected in Congress," Ms Gott says, noting that "fiscally conservative Democrats, allied with Republicans, will question a big-ticket package for basic health care, let alone expanding to include long term care."

The cost of health care reform will be huge, and would be much larger with long-term care included. "If the Obama administration's health proposal moves forward in its current form,"Ms Gott says, "it will easily cost $100.0 billion per year to fund. If you added in the cost of long-term care services, the total outlay would easily double." That is extremely unlikely to happen, she points out. In addition to the natural resistance of conservatives in Congress, there is an additional challenge. "If you give doctors, hospitals, drug companies, insurers and all the others what they want to get them on board, you will create an enormously expensive bill and subsequent opposition. That's why the California health bill failed earlier this year when the total costs became clear," she contends (Marketletters passim).