Yes, the insurance companies use misleading statistics about how many people go into nursing homes. Yes, most people who go into nursing homes have short stays, for either happy or sad reasons. But it is not
rare to go into a nursing home for long periods of time.
According to the CDC,, the good news is that the average stay is 835 days and the median stay is 463 days. But those number in themselves tell you there is a huge positive skew, and I can't find the chart now but it looks almost like an exponential distribution--there's almost no upper limit and the taper is very slow.
The bad news is that the CDC says 12% of all stays are for five years or more. 12% is not a negligible number. That's
much higher than the chance of your house burning down, for example. The reason LTCi is so expensive is that long-term-care is expensive and extended stays are
not a rare event.
It all seems pretty simple to me. If you can "afford" to pay for a nursing home stay of 5 years without any great impact on your finances, then you don't need to buy insurance. If you can't afford it but you can afford the insurance premiums, you should consider getting the insurance.
Long nursing home stays are not a myth. They happen. I've visited at least two people who had been in the nursing home, let me think--yes, both for over ten years. One is still alive, currently in her early sixties, mentally alert, and as far as I know healthy except for a spinal cord injury. She cannot move from bed to wheelchair without the help of a caregiver with a sort of miniature crane.
Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen and six, result happiness; Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery.