Retirement Planning, Long-Term Care Insurance and Lying

Carl Sagan once said: “One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we've been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. The bamboozle has captured us. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.”

The lie. As we continued our discussion about insurance and retirement planning, we are faced with falsehood. In all fairness, insurance companies are not necessarily liars but without a good indication of what the truth is, you have little hope in distinguishing whether or not what you are being told is true.

Oddly, the insurance industry feels just as strongly about you. Long-term care insurance, a policy that is bought well in advance of actual use, and sometimes by folks who trust that the policy they purchase is the right one for them, are often denied the claims they make and for reasons that seem to the average eye, simply minutiae.

“Nothing is easier than self-deceit. For what each man wishes, that he also believes to be true.” Demosthenes




In the book I wanted to emphasize the possibility that LTC insurance sales people were not as truthful about the product they are selling. I wrote “Back in 1965, noted psychologist/anthropologist Paul Ekman believed that human facial expressions were individual and not the result of some sort of evolutionary step that made the message we portray on our faces somehow universal.



Darwin published his work “The Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals” in 1872. The work suggested that particular emotions are attached to particular expressions in humans and in principle, to animals. What Darwin failed to understand was the nature of the falsehood. In fact, Darwin gave but one reference to the subtle art of deception when he wrote: “They [the movements of expression] reveal the thoughts and intentions of others more truly than do words, which may be falsified”.



Margaret Mead disagreed with Darwin suggesting that expressions were a result of culture not some universally inherited trait. This led Mr. Ekman on a worldwide journey to find the truth about what would later be a blueprint for falsehood. He showed pictures of faces experiencing a variety of emotions to a wide variety of people around the world and recorded their reactions.

But the experiment, he realized after a time was flawed. The people he had hoped would show some sort of innate reaction, one that was universal had been tainted by their contact with the outside world. Because, even in 1965, the world had shrunk considerably, many of his test subjects had seen Charlie Chaplin or John Wayne and understood what those faces meant. He needed to find subjects who were untouched by outside influences, a peoples who were technologically remote. He found just such a group in Papua, New Guinea.

Mr. Ekman found that there was a certain universality to how we express ourselves, confirming what Darwin suggested. From his study this remote tribe, he found that anger, disgust, fear, joy, sadness and surprise were universal expressions developed without outside influences. The ultimate goal: how to find out if someone was lying. He never, at least to my knowledge, applied his study of those 43 facial muscles, the ones that offer telltale glimpses into truth and lies to that of the insurance industry.


“Falsehood is easy, truth so difficult.” George Eliot

The reason you should be as skeptical as I am of this particular corner of the insurance industry has less to do with its relative newness as a product but rather with its aggressive selling by the industry. When a product comes to market, it is always promoted to the widest audience available. It is not different with insurance.



Trouble is, we only come face-to-face with an agent who represents a company and a product and that product is something we might not need in the near future. Long-term Care insurance is bought on good faith, research and soul-searching” and because of the time an effort most of us put into the purchase, we expect it perform flawlessly.

A large number of the claims the companies denied were due to paperwork not filled out properly or the right forms were not submitted. They also cited denial of claims were a result of the facilities the clients chose for care were not appropriate or acceptable for nursing care – although all of the people who had filed complaints had used state licensed facilities.

This is cause for concern among current and future policyholders. If Congress can offer incentives such as tax breaks to the industry to encourage people to buy the product, federal oversight may be necessary. This would take the industry’s current overseer, the state, out of the regulation game.

Even as states begin their own market investigations into the practice of long-term care, it adds another layer of concern about whether this industry is too young to be an important part of your retirement planning.

“Always tell the truth. That way, you don't have to remember what you said.” Mark Twain