| ong-term care is the greatest uninsured risk facing the American public today. The failure to plan for long-term care has had a serious, and often devastating, impact on families that are thrust into the role of caregiver to an elderly parent. The failure to plan for long-term care also has very serious consequences for society, which, through public programs such as Medicaid, pays for a huge and unsustainable portion of long-term care supports and services. The impact of the failure to plan for long-term care is becoming more devastating due to the confluence of several factors. People are living longer now than ever before thereby increasing the demand for long-term care services and supports, with the population of senior citizens expected to more than double in the near future. There are far fewer family caregivers available to provide care to elderly parents as a result of lower birth rates, later marriages, and the rapid increase of women participating in the workforce, reducing the available pool of family caregivers. Understanding the dynamics of long-term care planning, and the failure to plan for long-term care, is a necessary step in successfully addressing long-term care planning. Adult children of elderly parents rarely participate in their parents' future planning for long-term care. The purpose of this qualitative, multiple case study, was to explore how adult children's information deficiencies and risk aversion impact how they advise their parents on the purchase of long-term care insurance. The participants for the study were 12 adult children between the ages of 25 and 44, with incomes greater than... |
