The first half of this question is fine. The problem with the question is the last phrase:
“… or any part of personal or medical care in your home?”
Medicare HMO’s were very popular in 2002. Medicare HMO’s advertised themselves as offering “better benefits” than Medicare, especially for care at home. If someone taking this survey in 2002 thought that their Medicare HMO paid for “any part of medical care in your home” they might answer “Yes” to question N071 even though they did not own long-term care insurance.
If someone like that answered “Yes” to this question, CRR would count this person as owning long-term care insurance, even though they didn’t. Because of the ambiguous language used in the question, CRR had no way of weeding out people who incorrectly reported themselves as having LTC insurance.
If this person in 2004 or 2006 learned that they did NOT have LTC insurance, they would then answer “No” to question N071.
In this scenario, CRR would count someone as having lapsed their LTC insurance, even though they never owned LTC insurance.
This mistake would have been avoided if the survey had asked the two most obvious questions: Have you ever lapsed your long-term care insurance and, if so, why? But since the survey did not ask these questions we have no way of knowing how many errors like this were included in CRR’s data.