Concept research · August 2026
An insurance you buy while you are working. If injury, illness or age stops you working, it does not send a cheque — it provides the life: housing, food, medical care and everything else, at the standard you had before.
Yes — but only in pieces, and never for the people who need it most. Type A “Life Care” retirement contracts already do exactly this for the old and wealthy. Six countries run compulsory long-term-care insurance. Disability insurance covers the working-age half.
Nobody sells one lifetime contract that spans both halves, is bought at 45 rather than 75, and supplies the decisions as well as the money. For a person with no spouse and no children, that last part is the whole product.
Where the cover runs out
Ages at which each existing product actually protects you
The closest thing on the market is the Type A life-care contract — and it is closer than you might expect.
Pay an American continuing-care retirement community an entrance fee of roughly $100,000–$500,000 plus $2,500–$6,000 a month, and it houses you, feeds you, and covers unlimited assisted living and skilled nursing for the rest of your life — with no increase in the monthly fee as your needs grow. That is your concept, almost exactly. Two limits: you buy it in your seventies, and you must move in.
A quieter variant, Continuing Care at Home, sells the same promise without the move. Roughly 31 programmes exist in the United States, serving about 5,000 people — closer to your idea in spirit, and almost invisible in scale.
1,900
CCRCs in the United States — residents are about 2% of the older population
31
Continuing-Care-at-Home programmes, serving ~5,000 members
6
Countries with compulsory long-term-care insurance
$44bn
Global income-protection premium, 2025
Compulsory schemes began earlier than most people assume: the Netherlands in 1967, Israel 1986, Germany 1994, Japan 1997, Luxembourg 1998, South Korea 2007. All of them fund care services. None funds housing, food or income, and none appoints anyone to act for you.
The single hardest constraint on the design — and the reason to read the pricing below sceptically.
American insurers sold 755,000 individual LTC policies in 2002. By 2020 that was 49,000, and carriers had fallen from more than 100 to fewer than a dozen.
The cause was not fraud. Insurers underestimated three things at once: how many policyholders would claim, how long they would live, and how fast care costs would rise. Premiums on in-force policies rose 50–70% and more. Genworth faced three class actions over undisclosed multi-year increases.
Your product promises strictly more than those policies did, over a longer horizon.
Four design responses follow directly. Sell young, so premium compounds for decades before the first claim. Cap the service, not the sum, so cost inflation lands on a provider network rather than the balance sheet. Own or contract the care supply instead of reimbursing an open market. And reprice new cohorts freely while protecting the in-force book — precisely what the LTC industry failed to do, and what destroyed its reputation.
You asked how many people grow old with no spouse, no children and no one to care for them. Researchers call them kinless, and it is measured.
Adults with neither a living spouse nor living children
Share of the older population · most recent published estimates
Women born in 1975 who never had a child
Measured at about age 49 · these cohorts reach 80 in the mid-2050s
Never-married share of unmarried Americans aged 62+
Projection · these are people with no former spouse to fall back on either
What this means commercially: the measured 6–10% kinless rate is a floor, not a forecast. The cohort now aged 40–55 will reach old age with childlessness around a fifth to a quarter and never-married rates roughly doubling. A forward kinless rate of 12% is a reasonable central assumption — and it may prove conservative.
A funnel from population to paying policyholders. Every step is an assumption you can argue with — so every step is stated.
This is a model built from published anchors, not a measured population. The honest output is the range — 0.3 to 0.8 million policyholders — and it is far more sensitive to the take-up rate than to anything else in the funnel.
Each tier adds one genuinely new category of provision, not more of the last one. Indicative monthly premium for a healthy 45-year-old.
Tier 1
Foundation
$60–140per month
A floor under you, without changing how you live.
Tier 2
Home
$220–450per month
For staying in your own home as long as it is possible.
Tier 3
Full Care
$650–1,300per month
The Type A life-care promise, bought thirty years earlier and not tied to one campus.
Tier 5
Legacy
$2,500–5,000+per month
Protecting a standard of living, not just a floor.
Tier 4 · the reason the product exists
Guardian
Nothing on the market does this
$900–1,800per month
For the person with no spouse and no children — where the problem is not only paying for care, but that nobody has the standing to arrange it, check it, or argue with a hospital at two in the morning.
The 490,000 central case, split across the five tiers.
Annual premium by tier
Mature-state book · segment width is share of revenue
| Plan | Share | Policyholders | Premium / yr | Annual premium |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Foundation | 40% | 196,000 | $1,200 | $235M |
| Home | 27% | 132,300 | $4,200 | $556M |
| Full Care | 18% | 88,200 | $11,400 | $1,006M |
| Guardian | 11% | 53,900 | $16,800 | $906M |
| Legacy | 4% | 19,600 | $42,000 | $823M |
| Total | 100% | 490,000 | $7,194 avg | $3.5bn |
For scale: the entire global income-protection market is about $44bn in premium. A mature $3.5bn book would be roughly 8% of that — large, but not implausible for a category with no direct competitor. Low case ~$2.2bn, high case ~$5.6bn.
Four questions decide whether this is a business.
1 · Can you hold a forty-year promise? You collect from 45 and may pay out from 80 to 100. That is a longer, more inflation-exposed liability than the policies that broke the last generation of insurers. It probably requires owning the care supply rather than reimbursing it, and regulators will demand reserves to match.
2 · Will people buy at 45 for a risk they feel at 75? This is the commercial question, and the honest answer is that nobody has proved it. The kinless are the one segment with a reason to act early, because they cannot fall back on a daughter. Guardian is the wedge: sell the advocate, not the annuity.
3 · Who regulates it? The product is simultaneously insurance, a care provider and a fiduciary. In most countries that is three licences and three regulators. Expect to launch in one jurisdiction and be unable to port the contract.
4 · Does adverse selection sink it? People without family know they have no fallback, so buyers are exactly those most likely to claim. Underwriting at 45 helps; a long qualifying period helps more.
None of these is fatal. All four were fatal to somebody.