COVID-19 and Long-Term Care Insurance Operations
What You Need to Know
Facilities have a hard time keeping employees.
Insurers have trouble getting the information they need to handle claims and appeals.
Fraud investigators have trouble getting a good, in-person look at the people they want to see.
COVID-19 has had a tragic and shocking effect on long-term care in the United States.
About 23% of U.S. COVID-19 deaths have involved people who lived in LTC facilities or worked in LTC facilities.
Everything else pales in comparison with that grim statistic.
But the pandemic has affected the operations of long-term care insurance issuers and LTCI issuers’ service providers.
The Intercompany Long-Term Care Insurance Conference held a panel discussion on those effects Monday, in Raleigh, North Carolina.
Paula Johnson, a vice president at LTCG, was the moderator.
The speakers were Micki Lockard, director of long-term care claims and compliance at CNA Financial; Jeff Ferrand, vice president of fraud services at LTCG; and Sandy Jones, a partner at a law firm, Faegre Drinker. (I am working with Faegre Drinker on an LTC planning podcast series.)
The Facilities
Paula pointed out that the pandemic has cost U.S. LTC facilities about 250,000 employees, increased spending on employee pay, and hurt facilities’ ability to meet minimum staffing requirements.
Micki said home health care agencies have struggled to compete with companies like Target for good employees. The home health care agencies have been paying $12 to $14 an hour in much of the country; Target pays $18 an hour.
At LTC facilities, the labor shortage is so severe that the shortage is resulting in lower admissions.
The Insurers
Micki said the pandemic-related shift to working at home helped LTCI issuers like CNA in one way: CNA could hire employees away from its geographic location.
But that put the company in competition with other employers in other areas in the same industry.
Managers have had to learn how to supervise people remotely, and they had challenges keeping people.
Insurance carriers are responding by working to make more use of automation.
