Consider also that by the time you need a nursing home or some other form of continual skilled care you are probably going to die within that year.
"Long-Term" is sort of a scare tactic that is used to get you imagining that you're going to be needing expensive skilled care for years. That can happen, but isn't normal.
Severe dementia id exactly when it does happen, though. Most patients die within months of moving into a nursing home. Dementia patients average ten years.
“That can happen but isn’t normal” is exactly the kind of thing that insurance should be for. Unfortunately, US health insurance is more oriented towards covering everything rather than spreading out the risk of rare high-cost events.
If you get the PPO, you have an in-network annual benefit cap of $2,500. So you're paying your insurance company to pay your dentist for you? And as soon as the bill gets large enough that you'd actually need insurance, they tap out?
What's the problem? 2500 is enough to get a cleaning and a couple fillings per year. If dental insurance covered everything you need, now, at no extra cost, people would simply get coverage for a year, get their mouth fixed, and cancel it.
The studies I’ve seen that say months or a small number of years specially look at older adult admissions, so may exclude a lot of dementia patients.
US study:
> The mean age of decedents was 83.3 (SD 9.0) and the majority were female (59.12%), and White (81.5%). Median and mean length of stay prior to death were 5 months (IQR 1-20) and 13.7 months (SD 18.4), respectively. Fifty-three percent died within 6 months of placement. Large differences in median length of stay were observed by gender (men, 3 months vs. women, 8 months) and net worth (highest quartile, 3 months vs. lowest quartile, 9 months) (all p<.001). These differences persisted after adjustment for age, sex, marital status, net worth, geographic region, and diagnosed chronic conditions (cancer, hypertension, diabetes, lung disease, heart disease, and stroke).
"Long-Term" is sort of a scare tactic that is used to get you imagining that you're going to be needing expensive skilled care for years. That can happen, but isn't normal.