Life Care Planning Cost Techniques: History, Methodology, and Literature Review

The following paper summarizes a presentation given on May 13, 2022, at the 2022 Life Care Planning Summit. In this presentation, we discussed the origin and evolution of costing techniques used by the life care planner to include a contemporaneous overview of the methods currently used in the specialty practice. We also sought to understand the origin of “associated costs” as a component of a life care plan, as per the 1998 definition. Another goal was to learn how life care plan costing methods have evolved and reviewed how various articles and published in literature have contributed to an understanding of life care plan costing techniques to date. This article will discuss the history of costing and its evolution to life care planning today. It will include a review of who prepares life care plans and what their credentials and associations require when costing, the definition of a life care plan in its first inception, and what the body of literature published on costing reveals about techniques.