With an aging population and more people living beyond the age of 85, insurers need to do more to help customers who may need to face long-term care, according to Rose St Louis, protection director at Lloyds Banking Group.
St Louis (pictured) was speaking at the Protection Review at the Landmark Hotel in London yesterday.
She said the UK had more than 360,000 people living in long-term care homes as of February this year, an increase of 3% over the previous year. Of those, 137,000 were self funders.
“I have personally experienced someone from my family going into care and it’s not cheap,” St Louis said.
“The annual residential care home costs £48,000 rising to £53,000 pounds when nursing care is added,” she said.
“No doubt there will be people in this room who will probably be in a care home at some point.”
Talking about reaching out to customers, St Louis asked “Who’s having this conversation about long-term care., when we know its a bigger and bigger problem?”
“My dad got cancer when he was 68 for the first time. He’s now 72 and he’s got it again.”
While acknowledging that there were some amazing products out there, St Louis asked the industry to “spend maybe less time creating additional bells and whistles on those products and spend more time focusing on those products for our currently inaccessible market.
“I also ask that we get creative in product Innovation. Let’s think very differently about how we can serve the needs of those customers that we’re currently not serving.
“And when we do that, let’s think about not trying to put them into a box, so you can compare them next to each other – because sometimes products aren’t comparable, but they absolutely serve customer needs.
“And my third ask is that we demand the need for some of these products to motivate insurers and reinsurers to think broader and think more heavily and think more meaningfully about how we can do the job that we love doing – serving, our customers and being there for their moment of truth.”