gibby -- There was a reduced-benefit clause in the LTC policies we took, too. I was wrong when I wrote that we took them 15 years ago. It was 20! Also, we had to pay in for TEN years, not TWO, to (possibly) get something back. We'd paid in $11,000 in premiums at the end of ten years. This was a group LTC policy from Hancock, offered to us by my DH's then-employer. After ten years we became eligible for reduced-amount benefits. Each policy will pay $45/day for *skilled nursing care*, to a lifetime max of $82,000. The verbiage on any other type of care is obscure with lots of hoops and mazes. Looking at it now, I think we will have aided tbe taxpayer -- seems to me these benefits would reduce the cost of our care to Medicare. If I'd had any doubts about problems collecting on the policies, they were sustained when it took me six months to get a letter from Hancock stating that each of us had actually qualified for this reduced-benefit coverage. We eventually received single-page letters, undated and without signatures, with a lot of 'may qualify' and 'could be' phrasing. Their legal department could send us packing without breaking a sweat. Our situation is different than yours as to probable need for the policy. I'm glad you'll take that opt-out clause. You might want to see a letter stating exactly what YOUR reduced benefits will be, specific to YOUR policy and YOUR premiums, before you sign up.

chisue, understand the lesser of two evils. They use prednisone for my disease too. Thankfully, I've never been bad enough to have to use it on a daily basis. I'm allergic to one of the main drugs to treat my disease so if my current drugs really stops working I will have no choice but to take those awful , dangerous and expensive drugs. Hopefully it will never come to that. I have one older brother that did not move to the States when my family moved and so I've really been thinking about how much easier it was for him to retire in Canada. No jumping through all these hoops to figure out how to get his health care needs covered. Emma, what I understand is that they don't have to insure you if you have had a gap in insurance and are outside the 6 month open enrollment. Our situation was a little confusing to these insurers because our medicare part A automatically kicked in at 65 and our B took effect two years later when my husband turned 67. So they carelessly were just looking at the date part A kicked in and assumed we'd had a two year gap in coverage. Some asked if we'd been on cobra. They were asking for proof of insurance until I reminded them that medicare B was just starting and we were within the 6 month open enrollment. The drug plan still said that if I had not been covered they would have raised my premium.Not sure if that is legal under the 6 month open enrollment, but I didn't research it anymore sine it didn't apply to me. In my case, if I went without and then ended up going on one of those $3000 a month drugs and then decided at that time to get part D, no one would be too excited to insure me . And you can bet if one of my drugs was $3000 a month and they agreed to insure me, my premium would be pretty hefty. Our total costs for the two of us are around $480 a month United(AARP) is $116.78 for me, $121.94 for my husband. It is community based which means they can't raise your premium just because you are a year older. It goes up according to your zip code. In my state there were only two options for community based or issue age --the two that can't be raised because you are a year older. All the others were attained age which will go up for each year older you get. Then medicare B is $99.90 for each of us. I'm paying $27 for my part D and my husband picked the cheapest for 15 a month. I didn't figure it was as important to get the perfect plan with drug because it apparently is easy to change at the end of the year if what you picked didn't work out so well. It just seemed to me that there was a real learning curve to getting this all arranged. Dedtired, I'm confused why you would be paying 300 a month for medicare part B or something else?? something doesn't sound right.

In Rita May's defense, sometimes the choices we have to make are difficult. It's easy to say that it isn't a good idea to not have health insurance. But the cost can be prohibitive. I don't know if prices are uniform all over the country or not, but I can tell you that here in California private insurance costs are outrageous. And fewer and fewer employers are offering health insurance to employees, or are making them pay a large portion of it. And because DH has had cancer, changing insurances isn't a real option for us (remember pre-existing conditions). Every year when our contract renews, of course the price goes up. Last year we were paying more than $1,100 per month for the two of us to have medical and dental. In June, when our contract came up for renewal, it was going up another $200+. So we ended up moving to a plan with less coverage to bring the cost down. And this is with a high deductible. So every month I pay for the privilege of SAYING that we have health coverage, but we pay full price until our large deductible is met (we're healthy, so deductible is never met). We argue about this subject every month when I write the check. He says we're throwing our money away. I argue that, while I agree that it's not helping us out now, chances are that as we get older we may need to be hospitalized for one thing or another and that is when the insurance will become "worth it". Many people have to choose between having health insurance and having food on the table. It isn't any wonder that there are so many uninsured. Sad, sad, sad.

In prior years, the medical deduction was limited to the only the expense amount in excess of either 7.5% or 10% of adjusted gross income (I forget which). So people needed to have some combination of low income and relatively high medical expenses to get any deduction for medical costs. Starting in 2018, the federal standard deduction will be $12K for single filers and $24K for joint returns. With the state tax deduction haircut to $10K in total and the same continuing limit on medical expenses, far fewer people will be itemizing deductions on their federal returns. For many people's state income taxes, changes corresponding to these federal changes have not been made and many may have a federal standard deduction while still itemizing for state taxes. I expect that when we have regime change in the US, the tax rules will be changed to revert to something closer to what they were before this latest round of nonsensical and deficit bloating changes. The upshot is that even for those who did deduct medical expenses (and insurance premiums) in prior years, far fewer will do so in the future. If there's no deduction for the current year (which you'll see when your return is prepared), there's no need to keep bills and correspondence beyond when each individual claim has been resolved.