Life care: new options for financing and delivering long-term care.

Continuing care retirement communities provide full insurance protection for and access to long-term care services. A new model, which retains risk pooling for long-term care and provides benefits and protections similar to continuing care retirement communities, is called life care at home. Life care at home combines the financial and health security of a continuing care retirement community with the freedom and independence of living at home and is affordable to a greater proportion of elderly people. The feasibility of this model is, in part, supported by the fact that nursing home use in the fully insured access-guaranteed continuing care retirement community is not that different from use among the elderly living in the general community.