Comprehensive financial planning today rests on three fundamental statements:

• You insure what you can’t afford to lose.

• You diversify what you can’t predict.

• You model what you can quantify.

There are no professional exceptions to these rules — no carve-out for titles, credentials, or scope statements.  Yet Long-Term Care (LTC) is the only material risk in financial planning that violates all three principles by omission, not by logic.  Only in this corner of financial services do we find experts, specialists, and regulators all effectively arguing that 1 + 1 + 1 = Elephant.

LTC became structurally unavoidable as life expectancy extended beyond traditional working years. Americans didn’t just live longer — they lived long enough to decline. Chronic disease replaced acute death. Medicine stopped saving lives to die later and started saving lives to live impaired. At that point, LTC stopped being anecdotal and became structural, and the math was no longer ambiguous.

The moment the question changed was the collision of longevity and cognition — most visibly through Alzheimer’s. It forced a shift no planning discipline could logically avoid. The question was no longer “Will people need care?” It became: Who pays?  Who provides it?  And for how long?  Those are core planning questions — not insurance questions — and they predate portfolios, products, and software.

Modern financial planning evolved around what could be monetized, modeled, and optimized in software. Markets, taxes, and time fit cleanly. Loss of health and independence did not. It was messy, emotional, and conveniently relegated to someone else’s problem. Rather than redesign the model, the system quietly reclassified LTC risk from a planning obligation to an insurance sidebar — then to a footnote. That decision persists today. Major institutions still frame “retirement healthcare costs” while explicitly excluding LTC, reducing loss of independence to nothing more than an asterisk.

Financial planning tolerates differences of opinion — assumptions, products, strategies. It does not tolerate unrecognized liabilities. LTC is not controversial because it is emotional. It is controversial because the system chose not to book it at all. And then, like magic, everyone became a fiduciary — yet instead of deciding where LTC risk sits, on the balance sheet or off it, many simply pretend it doesn’t exist or assume it won’t happen to their clients or families.

In the real world, risk logic is applied consistently. LTC cannot remain optional, emotional, or “outside scope.” Regardless of title, license, or advisory relationship, it falls squarely inside fiduciary, best-interest, and Know-Your-Client guardrails — and becomes a math problem that must be solved. The issue is not bad math. It is an incomplete model — and one that is rapidly becoming impossible to defend.

20251230