Canada's insurers face an uphill battle selling long-term-care insurance, and they'll have to try harder to persuade me.

We all know there's a chance we will eventually need help to perform normal activities of daily living.

But the cost of insurance to pay for someone to help us bathe, eat, dress, use the washroom or move from bed to a chair is high.

We would have to be incapable of doing two of those things for more than three months before we would collect a cent from one of these insurance policies.

And I have yet to see a private insurer provide the detailed analysis it would take to persuade me that my wife and I should fork out nearly $5,500 a year from our pension income to maintain such coverage.

Manulife Financial has recently announced what it says is a unique shared-coverage option with the company's LivingCare policy that would save couples money compared with two separate policies, but only about 10 per cent.

A couple would pay $3,376 a year at age 50, or $7,551 from age 65, to buy a benefit that would pay the equivalent of $1,500 a month for care in the home or $3,000 for care in a facility, up to a maximum of $300,000 per person.
All benefit amounts would be adjusted by 2 per cent a year to deal with inflation.

But premiums would be payable to age 100, and could be adjusted upward if Manulife had underestimated the cost of the program.

Other policy options are available, but few consumers have been drawn to this type of insurance.

One marketing research firm has estimated reporting insurers have sold only about 60,000 individual long-term-care policies to Canadians after several years of trying.

A poll conducted for Manulife Financial suggests most us are worried about eventually needing long-term care.

But most of us expect to use our savings, government programs and the equity in our homes to pay for the cost of care, should we need to.

Paul Smith, Manulife's vice-president of marketing and product development, pointed out in a recent news release that government programs are likely to come under strain.

"By 2021, there will be nearly seven million seniors for the health-care systems to support, representing 19 per cent of Canada's total population."

But the cost of long-term care is not a major portion of the total health-care budget, and the expense is shared by the working population, by retirees and by the residents of nursing homes themselves.

Only about 4 per cent of Ontario residents over the age of 65 are now in some form of long-term-care facility, according to a spokesperson for the Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care.

They are paying from their own pockets up to $1,543.95 a month for basic accommodation and $2,091.45 for a private room, plus other fees for hairdressing, cable TV and telephone services.

A subsidy is available only to those in need, and only for basic care.

The background material with Manulife's latest news release has eight graphs to illustrate the results of the consumer survey, but doesn't contain a single mention of prices, or the impact the new shared-coverage option will have on prices for couples.

We had to ask three times before we got an answer to our question about prices.

That would seem a fundamental piece of information for persuading consumers that such an insurance policy is a smart choice.

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