In addition, UNUM plans to combine disability policies with long-term-care policies that promise to pay nursing-home expenses for the elderly.

Today's Columns Many insurers have been making long-term-care policies more attractive to the elderly.

About 400,000 individual long-term-care policies were sold last year, and GE Capital Assurance, one of the largest sellers, projects a 10 to 15 percent increase in industrywide sales next year.

David Kingsbury, 73, a retired General Motors employee in Berlin, Conn., recently bought a long-term-care policy for his 70-year-old wife, June, for $1,200 a year.

More than 577,000 long-term-care policies were bought in 1988, bringing the number of these policies to more than one million, said the Health Insurance Association of America.

This lose-lose situation, for both the private payer of nursing-home costs and for the taxpayer, shows that it is time to make structural changes in our long-term-care policy.

Nevertheless, a number of experts are now calling for state insurance regulators to require that all long-term-care policies contain mandatory nonforfeiture benefits.

Tens of thousands of elderly Americans have received life-prolonging care as a result of their long-term-care policies.

Conseco is among the nation's largest insurers, collecting premiums worth more than $4.2 billion in 2006, of which long-term-care policies contributed 21 percent.

Under one plan, a 64-year-old New Jersey resident could buy a very basic long-term-care policy at a fixed premium of $460 a year.