My wife Pam and I bought private long term care insurance about twenty years ago. It’s a pretty good deal. For about $100 per month, we will someday – when we need it – be eligible for up to $200 a day toward either home health care or nursing home care. Add it up – it could save us hundreds of thousands of dollars as we age. I’ve been a big supporter of long-term care insurance since I was a Connecticut State Legislator in the 1980s. But to be honest, it’s never quite gotten the traction it should have. One of the reasons is that when people are young and healthy, they aren’t thinking about what their long-term care needs might be thirty or forty years down the road. But that’s when premiums would be most affordable. The bigger problem is that it’s really hard for insurers to predict the costs of long-term care that far in advance, too. The costs of care often far exceed those that are estimated way in advance. As a result, the policies that Pam and I have aren’t even offered anymore
I never held it against Donald Trump that my son died of a fentanyl overdose in January 2021. Yes, he had been President for four years at that point, and he hadn’t really done anything to stop the wave of drugs coming across our southern border. I just figured it was bad luck for Tim – street drugs laced with fentanyl that happened to be in California but could have been anywhere. But when Kamala Harris recast the border crisis last week as a crisis of human, weapons, and drug trafficking, it made me think. Why hadn’t Trump done more when he had the chance? And why does he keep attacking immigrants as people instead of addressing the real problems that sometime accompany open borders? Maybe – if he weren’t so darn weird, angry, and bigoted all the time – this guy could have done something when he was President to secure the border better and reduce the flow of fentanyl into our country. Or even this year, if he weren’t so self-centered he might not have killed the bipartisan border