This one surprises almost everybody. Your health insurance, whether it’s from work, the marketplace, or Medicare, is built to pay for medical care. Long-term care is mostly help with everyday living, like bathing, dressing, and getting around safely, and that’s something health insurance generally doesn’t pay for, whether you live in Denver, Colorado Springs, or up in Steamboat.
What Medicare does cover. After a qualifying hospital stay, Medicare can cover skilled nursing or rehab for up to 100 days, with full coverage for the first 20 and a daily copay after that. The key words are “skilled” and “up to.” Once you’re stable and mostly need help with daily living, Medicare usually stops paying, even if it’s day 30. Medicare plans here in Colorado all follow that same basic rule.
What Health First Colorado covers. Colorado’s Medicaid program does pay for long-term care, both in nursing homes and at home through its home and community services, but only for people who meet its income and asset limits. Plenty of families end up spending down savings to qualify.
The ways people actually plan for it.
- Long-term care insurance. A policy built just for this, paying for care at home, in assisted living, or in a nursing home.
- Hybrid life and long-term care policies. Life insurance that lets you use part of the death benefit for care if you need it, and pays your family if you don’t. We talk about these a lot on the Colorado life insurance side.
- Colorado’s Partnership Program. This one’s a hidden gem. If you buy a qualifying partnership long-term care policy, Colorado protects an equal amount of your assets if you ever need Medicaid later. Every dollar your policy pays out is a dollar of savings Medicaid won’t count.
We help a lot of Colorado families at Uncle Sheldon Insurance sort out where their Colorado health plan stops and long-term care planning starts. The earlier you look, the cheaper and easier it tends to be.