Boomer or Bust: Your Financial Guide to Retirement, Health Care, Medicare, and Long-Term Care

Chapter 10. Alternatives to Long-Term Care Insurance

	“Everybody wants to live forever, but nobody wants to grow old.”
	--Jonathan Swift

What Swift neglected to say, perhaps because it goes without saying, is that even more undesirable than growing old is growing old in a nursing home. But unfortunately, it is a fact of life for many older Americans. The cost of long-term care in a nursing home is expensive. Finding the funds to pay for this care can be difficult.

For many people, deciding to how to fund long-term care needs is reminiscent of the old joke about the heavily accented Maine resident telling the tourist requesting directions, “You can’t get there from here (pronounced ’heah’).”

Many people who want to provide for long-term care have ...