Long Term Care Insurance with State-Dependent Preferences

Abstract

We study the demand for actuarially fair Long Term Care (LTC hereafter) insurance in a setting where autonomous agents only care for daily life consumption while dependent agents also care for LTC expenditures. We assume that dependency decreases the marginal utility of daily life consumption. We rst obtain that some agents optimally choose not to insure themselves, while no agent wishes to buy complete insurance. We then show that the comparison of marginal utility of income (as opposed to consumption) across health states depends on (i) whether agents do buy LTC insurance at equilibrium or not, (ii) the comparison of the degree of risk aversion for consumption and for LTC expenditures, and (iii) the income level of agents. Our results then oer testable implications that can explain (i) why few people buy Long Term Care insurance and (ii) the discrepancies between various empirical works when measuring the extent of state-dependent preferences for LTC.

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Replaced by

Philippe De Donder, and Marie-Louise Leroux, “Long Term Care Insurance with State-Dependent Preferences”, Health Economics, September 2021.

Reference

Philippe De Donder, and Marie-Louise Leroux, “Long Term Care Insurance with State-Dependent Preferences”, TSE Working Paper, n. 19-1061, December 2019, revised August 2021.