There are many opinions about long-term care insurance mainly based on anecdotal evidence. Once a year the American Association for Long-Term Care Insurance publishes a LTCI Sourcebook that cuts through the fog of opinion and helps establish the facts instead.

The 2009 version of this publication just became available and here are the results of the data gathered from a large sampling of the leading long-term care insurers about those who have an individual long-term care insurance policy:

 8.25 million Americans currently have long-term care insurance and last year 8.5 billion dollars were paid in claims to 180,000 policyholders. Of the new claims opened during 2008, 61% were age eighty or older, 30% were between seventy and seventy-nine and only 9% were under the age of seventy.

 Sales by issue age – It was found that 24% of buyers were between the age of forty-five and fifty-four. 53% were between fifty-five and sixty-four. 15% were between the age of sixty-five and seventy-four.

 Sales by daily benefit amount – Only 6% bought policies with a daily benefit between $50 and $99, while 31.5% were between $100 and $149, 35% were between $150 and $199, and 27% bought more than $200.

 Sales by elimination period – The overwhelming favorite elimination period chosen was ninety days with almost 83% of buyers choosing it.

 Sales by benefit period – Benefit period choices by consumers were as follows: 2 years – 7%, 3 years – 30%, 4 years – 15%, 5 years – 24%, 6 – 10 years – 11%, Lifetime/Unlimited – 13%.

 Sales by benefit increase mode – 40% chose 5% compound interest, 16% chose simple interest, 13% chose a Future Purchase Option, 7% chose CPI (consumer price index), 14% chose none, and 10% chose other forms of inflation protection benefits instead.

There were many other interesting facts revealed by this important gathering of data that I will try to include in future articles. The information presented here should be helpful to anyone who is seriously considering the purchase of long-term care insurance.