There will be a new deduction line on your paycheck starting July 1st – so you can pay into the state’s long-term care fund.
The cost of WA Cares will roughly $12 per paycheck for someone who makes $50,000 a year. The rate is 58 cents per $100 earned, so what you pay varies by how much you make. You have to pay in for a minimum of 10 years to receive the full benefit of $36,500, although many people will pay for much longer than that. The promises are that the WA Cares trust fund will be solvent for 75 years and that the benefit will increase with inflation. The money is invested so that the fund itself will grow and earn interest.
The reality, says Washington State AARP director Marguerite Ro, is that 80% of us will need long-term care after age 65, but 48% of those people will need long-term care for one year or less. Ro says most won’t need full time care. Ro says, “They just need a few hours of help each day with tasks, like bathing, meal preparation, transportation or home modification (like building a ramp or adding grab bars in the bathroom), and 90% of us don’t have the resources to pay for it.”
Opponents have said one of the plan’s flaws is that you lose if you leave Washington, but there’s a commission that includes members of the State Legislature working on “portability”, so that you get what you’ve paid for even if you move out of state. WA Cares fund director, Ben Veghte, says there’s no set policy yet, but there’s a recommendation. “Any worker who pays into WA Cares for at least a year, if they leave the state subsequently, could choose to continue participating in WA Cares, which would mean you would continue paying in until you hit age 67, which is the normal retirement age under Social Security,” Veghte says, “and then, if you did that, you could claim full benefits anywhere in the country.”
There were also complaints that people nearing retirement or who get hurt would pay in for a few years but get nothing, but now there are terms to allow some partial benefits for people who don’t pay for the full 10 years required to get full benefits.
