How Do Retirees Cope with Uninsured Medical and Long-Term Care Costs?

Anqi Chen, Alicia H. Munnell and Gal Wettstein

Working Papers, Center for Retirement Research at Boston College from Center for Retirement Research

Abstract: Even the best-laid plans can go awry. Individuals face many hurdles to adequate planning for retirement and, even when precautions are taken, they may be overwhelmed by a big enough shock. In particular, large medical and long-term care (LTC) spending shocks can devastate retirees’ hard-won finances. What, then, do individuals and households do when first-line plans to deal with healthcare costs fail? This paper studies the consequences of large out-of-pocket (OOP) medical and LTC shocks on retired households to explore this question, focusing on the Medicare-eligible population of over 65-year-olds. A large shock represents a failure of insurance to insulate the household from the healthcare expenditure, either because of lack of coverage (typical for LTC) or because of cost-sharing in existing insurance (typical in health insurance).

Pages: 45 pages
Date: 2025-04
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://crr.bc.edu/how-do-retirees-cope-with-unins ... ong-term-care-costs/ R
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 403 Forbidden

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:crr:crrwps:wp2025-06

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers, Center for Retirement Research at Boston College from Center for Retirement Research Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Amy Grzybowski () and Christopher F Baum ().