Long-Term Care Insurance for the Elderly: A Review of Evidence and Suggested Policies for Iran

Given the high expenditure of universal long-term care for elderly and the challenge of financing it for most countries, this article intends to examine leading countries to provide solutions for Iran.

The present study is a comparative study using domain review and examines the evidence related to the insurance for long-term care in the selected countries in six dimensions: type of insurance, type of membership, contribution rate / premium, inclusion criteria for coverage, the scope of services covered, and ultimately cost sharing through studies reviewed in the electronic databases.

The results in the six countries showed that long-term care insurance requires public sector support in full or partly in combination with the private sector. This insurance’ being consistent with basic insurance coverage, its mandatory nature, the combination of government and individual financing (deduction from salaries or taxes) and the existence of a limited user fee to receive services, have saw in all these countries. The type of coverage is defined either universally or only for the elderly, and finally the scope of services in these insurances is graded based on the degree of dependence, the time required and the place of receiving the service.

In all studied countries, compulsory insurance coverage for long-term care was designed to allow for cross-subsidization. Consolidation and reduction of fragmentation of resources and expansion of integrated risk sharing is an important prerequisite for designing long-term care insurance in Iran. It is necessary to implement of the law requiring supplementary insurance to only cover services outside the basic insurance package and redesign both the basic and complementary insurance packages to determine what can be defined in the form of long-term care insurance package.