Brief Overview of Long Term Care Insurance Elimination Period
The long term care insurance elimination period is somehow complicated and is often misunderstood by the policy owners. This is why it is important for the insured person to ask his insurance provider or insurance agent to thoroughly explain everything with regards to his LTC insurance policy. With this, the policyholder may be spared of being clueless or misunderstand the terms and conditions of the insurance plan that he bought.
A policy’s elimination period is defined as the length of time or duration between the day a claim was made until the day the insurance company eventually pays out the person of the costs of services that he has used or received. This is also often regarded as the waiting period or deductible period of an LTC policy. It means that the insured individual must have to pay the costs of LTC services that he will receive before his insurance provider would reimburse or pay him back the amount that he spent.
Since the elimination period is complicated, it is important that the individual understands everything about it. Also, there could be changes made depending on the type of LTC insurance plan that the individual has and for some instances, according to the state where his insurance policy is valid and applicable.
The length or duration of a policy’s elimination period may be decided upon by the insured person but be reminded that the number of days will directly affect the cost of the policy’s monthly premiums. Expect more expensive premiums if you are going to have shorter long term care insurance elimination period. But if you extend, say for example make the waiting period from six to a year, you may just save one-third of the amount of the monthly premium that you might spend with the average sixty days deductible period of your policy.
Remember that when choosing the number of days of the elimination period, the individual must consider his financial capacity and monetary ability to pay the services that he will receive during this time. One must also take into consideration the quality of services and facilities that he will use within this period.
There are also some LTC insurance plans that require an individual to be hospitalized for consecutive days before his insurance provider can pay back his expenses. Take note that this is one of the strict guidelines of insurance companies with regards to elimination periods. The individual must be able to receive consecutive days of treatment and hospitalization, not accumulated, because if so, this will not be considered as payable by his insurance company.
It takes a lot of courage and guts to avail an LTC insurance plan during these times of financial crisis in our country but it takes a lot more determination to go on and purchase one for the individual’s future LTC needs. The long term care insurance elimination period may be one of the aspects of LTC policies that one must completely understand, but this will surely be beneficial when the time comes that the insured person finally gets to use his policy benefits. And besides, the insurance agents, and other authorities in the insurance industry will surely be more than willing to help all those who are interested with acquiring LTC insurance plans.
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