Most insurers also offer a marital discount if a husband and wife each purchase a policy. Or, depending on your age, you may decide you don't need to buy coverage yet. Carroll recently reviewed a group policy from John Hancock offered to the Communication Workers of America by Bell Atlantic. They bought the Unum policy. Both will analyze group policies and compare them with individual plans at no charge.
Some policies offer home care at the same daily rate, others at half that.
If you can't afford to keep up the premiums later and allow the policy to lapse, you've wasted your money. No teacher like experience Barbara Pagani of North Caldwell, N.J., watched her father suffer with Alzheimer's disease, wiping out his life savings in the process. Determined not to let that happen to her, she persuaded her husband, Nicholas, to buy coverage for himself in 1990. Two years later, she bought a policy for herself. In 1997 Nicholas developed life-threatening complications following heart surgery and was later diagnosed with cancer.