Abstract
This paper reports survey evidence on long-term care (LTC) risk misperceptions and demand for long-term care insurance (LTCI) in Canada. We study three LTC risks: needing help with at least one activity of daily living, needing access to a nursing home, and living to the age of 85. We contrast subjective (stated) probabilities with objective (predicted) probabilities for these three dimensions, and define misperceptions as the differences between them. We first provide descriptive statistics about objective and subjective probabilities. We then analyse how risk misperceptions correlate with individual characteristics and how they affect intentions and actual purchase of LTCI. We find that although misperceptions significantly affect both intention to buy LTCI and actual purchase of LTCI, they cannot explain the low take-up rate of LTCI in our sample. Correcting simultaneously the perceptions of LTC risks on the three dimensions would increase LTCI take-up by at most one percentage point.
Keywords
Long-term care insurance puzzle; Disability; Misperceptions; Subjective probability;
Reference
Martin Boyer, Philippe De Donder, Claude Fluet, Marie-Louise Leroux, and Pierre-Carl Michaud, “Long Term Care Risk Misperceptions”, The Geneva papers of Risk and Insurance-Issues and Practise, vol. 44, n. 2, April 2019, pp. 183–215.
See also
Published in
The Geneva papers of Risk and Insurance-Issues and Practise, vol. 44, n. 2, April 2019, pp. 183–215