The Shared Care Advantage Long-Term Care Insurance for Couples What Is Shared Care? Shared Care is an optional feature in Long-Term Care Insurance (LTCI) that allows couples who both purchase policies to access one another’s benefits and thereby extend the maximum coverage provided by either policy. Most of the major insurers that market LTCI today offer it, and though there are slight variations from company to company, they all broadly achieve the same result.
How Shared Care Works? Most commonly, Shared Care requires that each member of a couple purchase a policy with identical policy values. The addition of
the Shared Care Rider to both policies allows either member of the couple to access benefits in the other’s policy if that person exhausts his or her own policy benefits. Upon the death of one member of the couple, the combined remaining benefits of both policies are transferred to the surviving partner (whose subsequent premium is reduced to their individual policy premium less the cost of the Shared Care Rider.)* Alternatively, some Shared Care Riders may instead offer a third “shared” pool of benefits. In this design, both partners have access to this “middle” pool. If one partner dies with remaining benefits left in the “third middle shared” pool, these benefits are inherited by the surviving partner.