Spending five minutes a day inverted is said to help prevent Alzheimer's, a condition that may result in the need for long-term medical care. So, to help your employees with long-term care issues, buy inversion tables for them and give them five minutes a day to use them.

Not exactly practical.

A better solution is to consider providing group long-term care insurance as an addition to your employee benefits program. You protect employees' health, incomes and lives with various group insurance programs. You even help secure their retirement with a group retirement plan. LTC insurance could help preserve the integrity of employees' retirement savings, income and potential inheritance in the event the employee, his/her spouse or parents need long-term care.

How to pay for LTC is getting the attention of governments at every level. The federal government is entering into partnership plans with states; such plans steer workers toward LTC insurance to keep them from relying on government-run programs to pay long-term care bills. As it is, Medicaid eligibility can be affected by having long-term care insurance, and certain state laws may require children to be financially responsible for the long-term care of their parents.

Individual long-term care policies often are not considered because they are perceived to be too expensive, or employees are not motivated to investigate them on their own. So, should the employer be responsible for providing such benefits? Well, that remains to be seen.

Most individuals have no long-term care insurance when they come to our office for financial, retirement or estate planning support. We discuss the concept and give them some cost figures to review. Our approach is that whether an individual has long-term care insurance or not should be the result of a well-informed decision, not a default. Your employees should review the product and the cost, then do a cost/benefit analysis and determine whether they should purchase the insurance or not.

Employers should do the same thing. Talk to your insurance broker. Look at plan designs, options and cost in order to determine whether this group benefit is necessary and appropriate for your business. You will then be in a position where you can make an informed decision.

In the end, you may find out that group long-term care insurance is less expensive than inversion tables.