Legacy status
Closed blockstopped new sales 2019
Once the largest seller of long-term care insurance in America, Genworth became its cautionary tale: roughly $31.8 billion in rate-increase approvals wrung out of policyholders, individual premiums doubled and tripled, class-action settlements, an admitted reserve shortfall — and executive bonuses tied to how much it could raise your premium. Now it wants to sell you a policy again.
Buy now, lock in peace of mind, and know your long-term care will be covered. A stable, blue-chip insurer — spun out of GE — standing behind a promise decades into the future. The marketing sold certainty.
The policies were underpriced from the start. To survive, Genworth has spent over a decade extracting an estimated $31.8 billion in premium increases from the very people it sold "peace of mind," on a block it closed to new sales in 2019 — while admitting in court it had under-reserved and misrepresented its finances. The certainty was never there.
Genworth's legacy long-term care policies were priced in the 1990s and early 2000s on assumptions that proved disastrously optimistic — too few lapses, too much investment income, too little claims cost. Rather than absorb the shortfall, Genworth built what it calls a Multi-Year Rate Action Plan (MYRAP), launched in 2012, to raise premiums on existing policyholders again and again, state by state, for as long as it takes.
The cumulative figure is staggering: an estimated $31.8 billion in net-present-value rate-increase approvals. In 2023 alone the company secured a record $549 million in approvals at a 51% weighted-average increase. For individuals, the numbers are brutal and wildly uneven — in a single 2022 Connecticut action affecting more than 2,000 policyholders, one received a 97% increase, another 173%, another 79%, the variance driven by policy series, inflation riders, and age at issue.
These are not customers who can shop around. They're typically in their 70s and 80s, often in declining health, and no longer insurable elsewhere. The rate increase isn't a market signal they can respond to. It's a bill they largely have to pay.
Genworth's rate-increase strategy has generated a decade of litigation, and the settlements tell the story:
Reporting has documented that Genworth tied executive compensation to securing rate-increase approvals. Read that plainly: the people running the company were paid, in part, on how successfully they raised premiums on elderly policyholders who couldn't leave. Whatever the legal defenses, that incentive structure tells you where the company's interests actually pointed.
To understand the company, you have to see that it's really two businesses stapled together. Beginning in late 2025, Genworth formally split its reporting into Enact — its publicly traded private mortgage-insurance arm — and the Closed Block, its runoff LTC, life, and annuity policies.
The contrast is stark. Enact is the profit engine, earning roughly $558 million in a recent year. The Closed Block — where your long-term care policy lives — posted a $317 million operational loss in a single quarter. In effect, a healthy mortgage-insurance company is lashed to a slowly sinking long-term care liability, and the rate increases are how Genworth keeps the second from dragging down the first.
The part of Genworth that makes money has nothing to do with your care. The part that holds your policy loses money — which is exactly why the premium notices keep coming.
In October 2025, after nearly a decade away from new sales, Genworth returned to the standalone LTC market with a product called Care Assurance, written through a new subsidiary, CareScout Insurance Company — live in 40 states by year-end, with more pending. The pitch is explicit: this time it's priced conservatively from day one, with clearer benefit limits, specifically to avoid the rate-increase spiral that defined its legacy book. CareScout also runs a growing network of vetted care providers the company says will lower claims costs.
The strategy may well be sounder than the 1990s pricing was. But two things deserve to sit side by side for any prospective buyer. First, the company asking you to trust its new pricing is the same one that spent a decade proving how wrong LTC pricing can go. Second — and this is the part that matters most — the new CareScout block is legally separate from the legacy block. Buying Care Assurance does nothing for the hundreds of thousands of existing Genworth policyholders still trapped in the closed system, still getting the letters.
If you own a legacy Genworth long-term care policy, more rate increases are effectively a certainty, and the notice will present "options" that are all versions of accepting less:
The bottom line: for most existing policyholders in reasonable health who can afford it, lapsing a decades-old policy is the worst outcome — you'd forfeit years of payments and can't replace the coverage at your age. But go in clear-eyed: this is a closed block designed to be repriced for as long as it exists, and no letter from Genworth will change that. If you're being sold a new Genworth policy, judge Care Assurance on its own terms — and remember the history that makes the "conservative pricing" promise necessary in the first place.