Employer Options

As an employer you have several options regarding offering long-term care insurance to your employees.

1. You can offer long-term care insurance to all of your employees on a voluntary basis only.
2. You can offer a "base" plan only. "Base" meaning a very basic plan that has limited benefits. Then, if the employee is interested in additional coverage they can "buy up" and purchase more coverage.
3. You can offer an employer-paid comprehensive long-term care insurance policy to all employees.
4. You can do an executive carve-out. You can legally carve-out classes within your employees and only purchase long-term care insurance for them. For example if you only wanted to pay the premiums for your senior management you could do that.

With some carriers, when you offer long-term care insurance to your employees they will receive discounted premiums. Often, these discounts are available to the extended family members (parents, in-laws, grandparents) of your employees as well. This is important because if your employees' family members have long-term care insurance this allows your employee to stay on the job rather than having to miss work, or worse, quit work to become a caregiver.

Implementation

Before taking applications on the employees, a series of educational efforts need to take place to encourage employee participation.

One on one meetings are also needed to meet the employees and their family members to encourage them to apply for the long-term care insurance.

Jodi Anatole, vice president of MetLife Long-Term Care, explains that because LTC is subject to so much regulation, brokers need to bring all the necessary information, much of it supplied by the carrier, to the worksite, and the employers need to commit themselves to their employees' LTC education. Much of the time, the light bulb does not go off for the worker unless she knows someone who has been through the kinds of problems associated with long-term care. However, Anatole notes, that segment of the workforce population is there - and growing. "The key is education," she says. "The more the employer allows the benefit to be put in front of people, the more successful it is... There should be information that focuses on what long-term care is and what it costs because the numbers are pretty startling. Unless employees have lived through it, they don't have any conception." Karen Lee, Employee Benefit News - January 2005

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