Packaged Long Term Care Policies

A majority of Long Term Care Insurance policies are sold as comprehensive and stand alone health plans. These plans have options of annual, semi-annual, quarterly or even monthly premiums. There are also other types of payments like an abbreviated payment plan. The comprehensive Long Term Care Insurance plan is similar to the group health plan or individual health plan. This type of plan covers most of the health care alternatives. There are four primary methods to package Long Term Care Insurance.

1. The Long Term Care Insurance may be packaged with life insurance with either or feature which is very beneficial and flexible. In case of policy holder dies, their beneficiary will get the death benefit. While in case of policy holder wants Long term care, prior to his/her death than instead of life insurance predetermined benefits are paid. You can buy this type of policy by either paying the one time premium of $ 50,000 or more or with quarterly, yearly premiums.

2. The Long Term Care Insurance is packaged as rider to life insurance policy’s cash value. This type of policy covers two different types and the premiums are also divided to pay for both.

3. The Long Term Care Insurance may be packaged with disability income policy. It can be used before the age of 65years. This type of packaged policy is mainly for disability income but there are possibilities of long term coverage if premiums are paid after the age of 65.

4. The Long Term Care Insurance may be packaged with deferred annuity that has single premium option. This type of packaged policy is for those people who has around $ 50.000 or more money that is free and don’t mind if it is tied up.
There is pending legislation which if passed will make Long Term Care Insurance premiums exempted form tax.

What is Long term care?

The Long term care may be defined as when some one can not perform their emotional or physical needs without the help of other for extended time period than it is termed as Long term care. The external help required for activities like pain management, bathing, comfort and assurance, walking, toilet usage, meals providing, feeding, money management, phone answering, visiting doctor, shopping, taking medication, transport providing, laundry, grooming, paying bill, letter writings, small home repairs, yard maintaining, snow removing etc. are covered under Long term care. Able people take this type of activities for granted.

There are many reasons that are responsible for Long term care like disability, terminal condition, injury, illness, old age etc. It is found out that around 60 percentage of population require extended help during their life span. For some, the Long term care lasts for few days or weeks or months. But there are some persons for whom the Long term care goes for years. Depending upon the person’s condition they require different periods of care. The care may be divided in to two broad categories.

Ongoing Long term care: This type of care requirement is for extended period, may be for months or years. Ongoing Long term care is required when

1. Disabilities of permanent nature

2. medical conditions which are chronic

3. Daily routine require help

4. chronic pain

Temporary Long term care: This type of care requirement is for short period, may be only weeks or months. Temporary Long term care is required when

1. recovering from illness

2. Recovering from surgery

3. Recovering from injury

4. Terminal medical condition

5. Hospital stay for rehabilitation

The Long term care services may be given in an adult day servicing home, in the house of the patient, even in the house of patient’s friends or any of the family member’s house, in a board and care house or in a nursing home or many other such places.

Understanding Long Term Care Insurance benefits

Out of all insurance products the Long term care insurance is the most complicated health benefit product. The Long term care insurance provides around 16 options of different benefits. Out of this 16 options each option also offer 2 to 5 selections. The story does not end here, daily benefits gives other selections which may be rounded up to 30 in number. So theoretically there are hundreds or thousands of different policies possible in the same plan. With the results there is thousands of premiums combination. For lay man to grasp all this different combination of policy is very difficult.

So to make this thing simple, best way is to limit the choices. For example many employer will pre select only 2 to 4 different combination of benefit, and offer their employees only this with extra riders like inflation protection, shortened pay or non forfeiture. This procedure will leave thousands of options in to only 10 to 20. Many see advantages of this procedure but there are also some disadvantages.

Selecting from very limited options prevents many employees from selecting other batter and richer benefit plans. Some time it is also observed that limited number of benefits which is often proved to be inadequate. The obvious danger of offering limited benefit policy is employees may be under the false impression that they are covered for particular thing when actually they are not covered. For example to increase the employees’ participation rate they are offered incomplete protections which reduce the rate of premiums and superficially look very attractive. Some time initial payment may be lower but it increases as time passes.

It is always better to select a Long term care insurance plan that offers the option of additional benefits. These additional options are mostly medically under written, but the coverage is very broad. Contrary to belief that underwriting has very strict rules and it is very difficult to be eligible, around 95 % of employees are qualifies for medically underwritten Long term care insurance plan.

Health Savings Accounts (HSA)

The Health Savings Accounts (HSA) is some what new in to the market of health insurance. Health Savings Accounts is based on entirely new concept and provide people with great option for health care insurance.

You should consider buying Health Savings Accounts insurance when you are seriously thinking health insurance as a form of investment. There are some restriction and regulations regarding Health Savings Accounts insurance plan. Different person find different benefits that is useful for them, for example if you are self employed than Health Savings Accounts insurance plan offer you the benefit like exemption from tax, up to the limit of $ 2,700 for individual plan and up to $ 5,450 for family plan.

For childless couple who does not own any health insurance, Health Savings Accounts insurance is good health plan, since purchasing Health Savings Accounts insurance and paying premiums regularly the amount of premiums will be accumulated in to tax free money. This money will be like lottery when after substantial time policy holder becomes old and their children becomes young. Large sum of money they will receive when they are old is really blessings.

Apart from many benefits, Health Savings Accounts insurance is not as famous as required. There are certain disadvantages which make Health Savings Accounts insurance good for certain types of people. Many people will benefit from Health Savings Accounts insurance but they don’t know about it. Slowly the situation is improving and people stated inquiring about Health Savings Accounts insurance. People become more aware about the savings on their expanses which is medical related. There are many people who opt for high deductible health plan combine with Health Savings Accounts. Now it is generally known that Health Savings Accounts insurance allow people to keep aside before-tax money, which can be utilize for future medical expenditure. This means that if people has Health Savings Accounts insurance and remains healthy than they may accumulate hundreds or thousands of dollar in their Health Savings Accounts at the time of retirement.

Whenever you take on a home renovation task, you can go beyond making visual enhancements. Home renovation projects also provide you with the ability to increase the energy efficiency of your home. Remodeling for a more energy efficient home won’t just be great for the environment – it will also save you money in the long run. No matter what kind of home improvement project you’re considering, it’s a good idea to find out if there are ways you can enhance your home’s energy efficiency. A good renovation project offers you the opportunity to add more beauty and value to your home, but it will be even more successful if you’re able to use that project to lower your energy bills and reduce your carbon footprint.

Tips for the Bathroom

The bathroom is one of the most popular areas to start home improvement projects. When you’re ready to start making some changes in your bathroom, it’s the smaller decisions that can help you to increase the energy efficiency of your bathroom. If you’ll be replacing faucets, sinks and showerheads as a part of your home improvement project, you can save on water by going with low-flow options that still provide you with plenty of water pressure. Another option is to invest in a dual flush or low flow toilet that will help improve energy efficiency in the bathroom.

Tips for the Kitchen

Kitchens are often the heart of the home and they are also a popular place for home renovation projects. It is possible to work on home improvement tasks that improve the function and aesthetic beauty of your kitchen while also working to make your home more energy efficient. Many kitchen home improvement tasks focus on replacing surface features, including floors, counters and cabinets. You can go with sustainable materials to help out the environment. Choosing the right appliances for the kitchen is the real way to save energy while taking on a kitchen home improvement project. Look for ENERGY STAR products that use less water and power, helping to cut down on your energy bills. These energy efficient appliances also come in great sizes and trendy styles so they’ll go along with your décor of choice in the kitchen.

Tips for Other Living Areas

While it may be more difficult to make living rooms, offices and bedrooms more energy efficient, there are still ways that you can work on energy efficiency when you take on these home improvement tasks. When you’re ready to remodel these areas, work to go with sustainable materials, such as hardwood flooring that is harvested in a sustainable way. Another option is to choose curtains that will help cut back on heat transfer, which will help keep energy bills down. Adding in some extra insulation while involved in home improvement tasks or adding in new ceiling fans can help reduce the cost of heating and cooling your home as well. Also, keeping in mind that materials pulled from the home can be recycled when you do a home renovation in living areas.

As you can see, you can find many ways to take on a home improvement project to improve your home’s aesthetic beauty, function, value and energy efficiency. As you plan out your next home improvement task, make sure you keep energy efficiency in mind. You’ll be taking great measures to help improve the environment while also finding ways to save money over time with a more energy efficient home.

The higher education sector is quite unlike other industries. It has its own processes and a different set of demands. Most commercial proprietary application vendors develop their applications focused on a wider domain spread across industries. This, academics complain, creates a distinct disconnect between software vendors and the end-users in academia.

To overcome these shortcomings, the education industry started looking to “open source” as an alternate model. Around a decade back, institutions started debating total cost of ownership in adopting an open source based community approach vis-à-vis proprietary applications, viability of open source based business models, sustainability and security issues.

The success of community developed open source software is quite well established. Linux and Apache are ample proof of its success. A similar trend, though not that widespread in its reach, can be traced to the development of community projects in education like the Moodle and Sakai.

Through the course of its formative years, the open source community based approach in education has developed several alternative models. Some of these models and schools of thought have thrived and been implemented successfully across a significant spectrum of the industry. Progress and success in open source projects like the Sakai, Moodle, Kuali, uPortal, Shibboleth, and many more are being closely watched by the industry.

Community Source Model

One school of thought believes that open source sharing is more a philosophical approach than a viable alternative. The adoption of open source in higher education seems to suggest otherwise. FLOSS (Free/Libre and Open Source Software) communities are thriving well in learning environments too.

The FLOSS model has been extensively used in initiatives like the MIT OpenCourseWare and Open Source Biology. Project Gutenberg, the Wikipedia, The Open Dictionary project are prime examples of how open source has been successfully adapted to education initiatives.

In a community source project, multiple institutions come together to partner in the project. All partners contribute financially as well as in employing human resources for the effort. In the early stages, the partnering institutions provide all design and development efforts and only in subsequent stages is the project opened to the broader community. This way, the initial support is secured and the institutions have a substantial influence in deciding how the application is modeled and designed.

The initial focus of community source projects is on collaboration between institutions. The focus in the crucial first stages is therefore to form a common economic outlook and an appropriate administrative framework rather than forming a community around a shared code. Most community based open source projects slowly migrate to open source in the later stages.

The Sakai project, for example, started as a joint effort between four institutions (Michigan, Indiana, MIT and Stanford). The initial agenda was to set up a framework of common goals that would produce appropriate software based on an agreed list of objectives. The scope for participation was later increased by forming the Sakai Educational Partners Program (SEPP), whereby other institutions can join and participate in the community for a small fee.

The Current Landscape

An education enterprise like any organization has its own needs ranging from resource planning to budgeting. Additionally, they have typical requirements like the need to integrate with financial aid programs of the government, multiple payroll cycles, and student information systems (SIS) that handle admissions, grades, transcripts, student records as well as billing. All these call for robust ERP systems. Until recently, colleges and universities mostly rely on either custom-developed systems that are more than 15 years old, or have transitioned to commercial products from vendors like Oracle, SAP, PeopleSoft or vendors like SunGard that are geared towards the higher education market.

Kuali Financials was borne due to the lack of open source solutions Enterprise applications in the higher education sector are comprised of a mix of some proprietary application vendors and some key open source community initiatives. PeopleSoft, Oracle, SunGard and Datatel are some key vendors that offer tightly integrated ERP packages for the education sector.

Recent consolidation in the industry, like the acquisition of PeopleSoft by Oracle and of WebCT, Angel, etc by Blackboard, has caused considerable unease in the education fraternity. The concern stems from the fear that the trend of consolidation would lead to the monopoly of a few key vendors. The plans of these vendors to offer tightly integrated systems heightens the fear that this will provide an unfair leverage to these vendors as it would extend the community’s dependence on them.

One area of concern about proprietary applications is a seeming disconnect between the industry and software application developers. Institutions also have strong reservations about the currently available administrative software and course management systems. The feeling is that applications provided by vendors such as SAP and PeopleSoft are adapted from other industries and does not work well for educational enterprises. Moreover, the proprietary nature of the applications implies that the source code is not available and customization efforts involve substantial costs.

In the context of such a wide breadth of requirements, open source can prove to be a viable alternative. In fact, these constraints provided the impetus for open source initiatives in higher education. Some of the success has helped provide a strong foundation to building an alternative support model for the education industry.

In the Sakai project, the participating institutions decided to integrate and synchronize their educational software into a pre-integrated collection of open source tools termed Collaborative Learning Environment (CLE). Sakai has active implementations running at multiple institutes including the University of Michigan and Indiana University.

In parallel, Sakai also established a set of activity based communities that have spawned an active cooperation between the industry and application vendors. The Sakai Educational Partners Program allows educational institutions to participate in the program for a small fee. Besides, there are the Sakai Commercial Affiliates, who offer fee-based services for installation, integration and support..

Kuali, on the other hand, mainly addresses aspects of educational administration. The Kuali Financial System (KFS) is the most prominent application. It handles administrative and operational tasks like general accounting, purchasing, salary and benefits, budgeting, asset management and grants. The system is designed around modules that enable it to be tweaked to work with existing commercial applications. For example, at Indiana University, Kuali applications work together with PeopleSoft’s HR and student system. The Kuali Foundation is a non-profit consortium of multiple universities and some hardware and software companies. The Kuali Commercial Affiliate program operates on similar lines like its Sakai counterpart. The community has been growing and now includes the University of California, Cornell, Michigan State University, San Joaquin Delta College (Calif.), and The University of Arizona.

Significantly, according to the 2008 Campus Computing Survey, around 13.8 percent of the survey participants have already identified an Open Source LMS – either Moodle or Sakai – as the campus standard LMS.

Besides these, several other projects offer SIS functionality. For example, openSIS manages student demographics, scheduling, attendance, grades, transcripts, and health records, and its parent company makes add-on modules to support additional features like disciplinary tracking, billing, food service, and bulk email/SMS messaging for emergency contact.

Other Key intiaitives are

JaSig community developing uPortal, and CAS (Central Authentication Services) two components serving as input to Kuali Rice.

Internet2 – A consortium led by universities working in partnership with industry and government to develop and deploy advanced network applications and technologies including products such as Shibboleth and Grouper

Open Source Curricula

As with any “open source” activity, open source curricula by its very definition is one that can be freely used, distributed and modified. A model like this would seemingly be antithetic to the concept of higher education as it strikes at the credibility of the education environment. Campus education is designed to operate as a structured learning methodology. The concept of community collaboration involving academics and students on the same platform brings a lot of unpredictability into the scenario

However, FLOSS communities (Free/Libre and Open Source Software) in education have proved to be quite successful. A key principle of this learning approach is its root in adapting it to the context of ones’ experience. With its stress on learners and their preferences, this learning approach focuses more on learning by collaboration, communication and sharing.

Significant initiatives include the Connexions Project at Rice University, the OpenCourseWare project at MIT and the social learning medium of Wikipedia.

The FLOSS approach in higher education has been operating in combination with traditional teacher centered approaches. The objectives of the FLOSS approach are not to replace traditional methods but to achieve synergies in combination and offer the learner an enhanced learning environment.

The ‘FLOSS-like education transfer report’ published in September 2008, as part of the FLOSSCOM project, notes that FLOSS communities can create effective learning environments. The study has also come up with three different approaches that could be combined effectively with traditional teaching approaches.

Economic Models of Open Source

One aspect that clearly marks the adoption of open source as a winner is the fact that in this scenario, the developers are most often also the users of the software. This removes the perceived disconnect between the developer community and the end-users unlike in the case of proprietary applications. However, this is less evident in the case of administrative applications like payroll or HR. In such cases, adoption of open source has to be a directed process.

Initiatives like the Kuali project have proved that open source can also build up sustainable models that provide adequate support mechanisms. In such models, there is active collaboration between the community that comprises not only developers and end-users, but also an extended support group comprising commercial vendors. These support groups are available to offer timely support to mission critical applications. The community approach also ensures that the code is not closed and that an active community of interest ensures that enhancements keep happening as necessitated.

Projects like uPortal have been developed with minimal resources but are deployed across hundreds of institutions. The community approach has proved sustainable as in the case of the Sakai project. In terms of funding, the Sakai project garnered an investment of $6.8 million over two years.

The viability of the open source, community based model stems not from the monetary or cost aspects but principally the adaptability that it offers. The debate over cost of ownership between commercially available proprietary software and open source applications is yet to be proved empirically. However, the fact that the code is open means it can be easily adapted to suit new requirements and does not involve significant investments in terms of customization or enhancements. This does make significant economic sense in the longer term.

The case for open source in higher education is nicely documented in a study by the Alliance for Higher Education Competitiveness. In a 2005 study report titled, ‘Will Open Source Software Become an Important Institutional Strategy in Higher Education?’ Rob Abel notes how open source is a “great fit for higher education”. The study, based on an analysis of open source projects in education, opines that the community-based approach is an interesting model that also helps reduce the inherent risks in adopting an open source approach.

As for the cost model, the study notes that while open source has helped generate cost savings in the range of 20 to 30 percent for the commercial sector, the same may not be entirely true in education. The community-based approach, the writer notes, with its associated participation fees, may prove only marginally beneficial in terms of costs. Institutions that have their own infrastructure and resources may however, benefit from substantially reduced costs from their open source initiatives.

The Future

Open source has proved to be adaptable and a reliable platform for collaboration and learning. In their quest for ideal application software to handle administrative, operational and education platforms, most CIOs are looking at interoperability, reliability and scalability of applications. Applications like the Sakai and Kuali have proved beyond doubt that open source applications offer great configurability.

Development communities and the support of commercial vendors, as in the case of Kuali and Sakai, fuel a greater rate of innovation. Moreover, the advantage that is offered by collaboration also provides an impetus to continued improvement of the system. Support systems and enhancements for future requirements are ensured.

On the question of how to approach or adopt open source as a model, the answer would depend on the needs, the infrastructure and the means available to an institution. The community development model has shown that costs can be broadly distributed amongst participants. Experience shows that universities and colleges can collaborate to produce open source software that caters to their needs in a way that is superior to some commercial products. The collaborative model enables educational institutions to pool their financial and technical resources. Moreover, a larger community ensures that the applications are tested in a variety of testing environments, thus aiding in building robust solutions.

In term of core academics, learning systems will evolve to accommodate formative assessments and evaluation outside the classroom. Many higher education institutions have taken the lead of MIT and are offering online course materials that are accessible by anyone, free of cost. It has been adopted at Yale, Notre Dame, Tufts and Stanford School of Engineering, to name a few. The United Nations has launched an initiative that would leverage social media technologies and ideas to offer higher education opportunities to people who would otherwise not be able to afford the costs.

Commercially, open source projects have taken their first steps in the marketplace. The model is evolving aided by some significant commercial vendor backing. For the community-based open source approach to prosper, substantial financial backing is an absolute necessity to prevent it from faltering and to avoid the pitfalls that arise form source code being easily modifiable and rebranded by a different vendor. From the commercial perspective, projects like Sakai and the Kuali Foundation are likely to thrive as they have substantial stakeholders from both the academic and the corporate world.

What could derail further adoption? There are several potential risk areas:

Lack of understanding of entry points for adoption
Lack of support to adopt the applications
Minimal staff to support the applications
Lack of training / documentation to train staff
A “runaway” project that consumes much press and develops a negative bias toward the project
Many of these risks may be mitigated though co-operative initiatives between the foundations developing the open source solutions and commercial affiliates looking to support the solutions – and develop complementation solutions. Some examples:

Further publicity through conventional, non-education related channels such as Google and industry-based sites such as edu1world
Furrther innovation and cooperation – whether through ‘summer of code’ collaborations; or community collaborations that will transform the current listservs to more accessible forums
Commercial affiliates offering training and webinars
Commercial affiliates offering ease of use entry points, such as pre-installed servers or virtual images that can be downloaded and used out of the box
In conclusion, open source initiatives in higher education have a long way to go before they enter the commercial mainstream in a significant fashion. However, with industry and academic collaboration, it has a great potential to change the higher education landscape in the longer term.

About Innovativ Consulting Partners: Innovativ Consulting Partners is one of the leading education consultants in the country. Innovativ provides consulting services to clients in the Higher Education and Public Sector industries. Innovativ is a premier Open Source consultant and provides products and services to support Kuali solutions. The Innovativ team have delivered Drupal consulting services and led successful implementations for clients within the Education and Public Sector industries Innovativ is an Oracle Partner