Brighthouse and Long-Term Care: What SmartCare Is, the Cost-of-Insurance Catch, and the 2025 Downgrades

Type "Brighthouse long-term care" into a search box and you get a muddle: old MetLife policies, a product called SmartCare, rate-increase complaints that may or may not belong to the company, and a recent run of unsettling financial-news headlines. The muddle exists because three different things share one corporate bloodline, and the internet keeps blending them together.

Here is the clean version. Brighthouse Financial sells exactly one product that touches long-term care: a hybrid policy called SmartCare. It does not sell standalone long-term care insurance, and it is not where your decades-old LTC policy lives. If you are holding a rate-increase letter on an old standalone policy and the Brighthouse name keeps surfacing, that is the brand-overlap confusion — your policy is almost certainly an older MetLife contract, and we cover exactly that situation in what happened to your MetLife long-term care policy. This piece is for everyone else: the person actually weighing SmartCare, or trying to understand what they already bought.

Brighthouse sells SmartCare — and only SmartCare

Brighthouse Financial was spun off from MetLife, with the separation completing in August 2017. The business that went into Brighthouse was MetLife's U.S. individual life-insurance and annuity operation. In February 2019 — its first product launch as an independent company — Brighthouse introduced SmartCare, and that remains its single long-term-care-related offering today. The company writes no new standalone individual LTC policies. So when the search results imply Brighthouse has a sprawling long-term care book, the reality is narrower: one hybrid product, sold to new buyers, since 2019.

That distinction matters because a hybrid policy and a standalone LTC policy behave very differently — on premiums, on cash value, on how the benefit pays, and on what can go wrong. The general trade-offs between the two structures are laid out in hybrid vs. traditional long-term care insurance; what follows is specific to how SmartCare is built.

How SmartCare's long-term care benefit actually pays

SmartCare is an indexed universal life (IUL) policy with long-term care riders bolted onto it. Mechanically, that means the policy is a life-insurance contract first. It carries a death benefit and an account value whose growth is linked (within caps and floors) to a market index rather than credited at a flat declared rate. The long-term care function comes from riders that work in two layers:

• Acceleration of the death benefit. If you have a qualifying long-term care need, the policy lets you draw down the death benefit early, monthly, to reimburse or pay for care. Every dollar used for care reduces the death benefit your heirs would otherwise receive.
• An extension-of-benefits rider. Once the death benefit is exhausted by care draws, an extension rider can continue paying long-term care benefits beyond that amount, for a defined additional period — which is what gives a hybrid policy a longer benefit runway than a simple death-benefit acceleration alone.

The appeal is straightforward and real: if you never need care, the death benefit pays your beneficiaries, so the premium is not "use it or lose it" the way standalone LTC premiums can feel. That single feature is why hybrids have taken over new LTC-adjacent sales while standalone policies have nearly disappeared. But the life-insurance chassis introduces a cost mechanism that standalone-policy buyers never have to think about — and it is the part most product reviews skip.

The cost-of-insurance catch most reviews skip

Sales material describes SmartCare's premium as level, and the scheduled premium generally is. That is not the same as saying your cost is fixed. Universal life policies — indexed or not — deduct internal cost-of-insurance (COI) charges and other expense and rider charges from the policy's account value each month. Those charges rise with age and are governed by the policy's terms, and the index crediting that is supposed to offset them is not guaranteed; it sits between a floor (often 0%) and a cap that the insurer can adjust.

Put those two facts together and the risk becomes clear. If index crediting underperforms the rosy illustration you were shown at sale, or if internal charges run higher than projected, the account value can erode. When account value erodes far enough, the policy can require additional out-of-pocket premium to stay in force — or it can lapse, taking the long-term care benefits with it. This is the structural difference between a hybrid and a standalone LTC policy that every buyer should internalize:

Neither structure is "safer" in the abstract. Standalone policyholders have absorbed brutal, visible rate hikes — the kind documented in our Genworth rate-filing history, and reflected in industry data showing the average requested standalone LTC rate increase reached roughly 56% in 2024 (with about 28% approved on average), per Society of Actuaries survey work. Hybrid buyers trade that visible risk for a quieter one: an illustration that may not hold. The honest framing is that you are choosing which cost risk you would rather carry, not escaping cost risk.

What changed in July 2024

SmartCare is not a frozen product. On July 22, 2024, Brighthouse announced a set of enhancements, the most consequential of which were a new 3% compound inflation growth option for the long-term care benefit and two no-additional-charge return-of-premium riders (a Return of Premium Surrender Benefit rider and a Return of Premium Death Benefit rider). The inflation option is the one to weigh carefully: long-term care costs compound for decades, and a benefit that does not grow with them quietly shrinks in real terms. A 3% compound option helps, though it is worth comparing against the actual trajectory of care costs in your area rather than assuming any single percentage keeps pace.

"Is Brighthouse Financial in trouble?"

This question drives a real share of the searches that land here, and 2025 gave it fresh fuel. The facts, stated plainly:

• S&P Global Ratings lowered Brighthouse's core operating-company financial-strength rating to A (from A+) in July 2025.
• Fitch Ratings downgraded Brighthouse Life Insurance Company's insurer financial-strength rating to A− (from A) in November 2025.
• A.M. Best has maintained an A (Excellent) financial-strength rating.
• In November 2025, Brighthouse agreed to be acquired by Aquarian, a private investment firm; following the announcement, S&P placed Brighthouse's ratings on CreditWatch with negative implications.

What does a financial-strength rating actually mean for a policyholder? It is a rating agency's assessment of the insurer's ability to pay claims over the long run. An "A" or "A−" remains investment grade — these are downgrades within a still-solid range, not a distress rating. The direction of travel (multiple downgrades, a negative watch, and a buyer with a weaker credit profile) is a legitimate signal worth tracking, especially for a product you might hold for 30 years. It is not, on the current facts, a signal that benefits are at risk.

There is also a backstop beneath all of this, and it deserves to be described accurately rather than waved as reassurance. If a life insurer ever became insolvent, your state's life and health insurance guaranty association covers long-term care benefits — but with limits. Under the NAIC model law the long-term care benefit cap is commonly around $300,000, measured in present value of benefits, and the exact figure varies by state. Three caveats matter: that cap can be below the lifetime maximum of a generous policy; the protection is calculated on a present-value basis, not a simple dollar-for-dollar of every future benefit; and it is triggered only by an actual insolvency — which has not happened here. The guaranty system is a floor for a worst case, not a reason to ignore carrier strength. The broader mechanics of how that floor works when any carrier fails or exits are covered in what happens to your coverage after a carrier exit.

Which Brighthouse question do you actually have?

Because the brand overlap causes so much wasted worry, it is worth sorting the reader's real situation before doing anything else:

Your situation	What's true	Where to go
I'm considering buying SmartCare	It's a hybrid IUL with LTC riders; weigh the cost-of-insurance risk and the inflation option above.	This page, plus hybrid vs. traditional
I have an old standalone LTC policy and keep seeing "Brighthouse"	That's the brand confusion; your policy is almost certainly an older MetLife contract, not Brighthouse.	Your MetLife LTC policy
I want Brighthouse's entity facts (NAIC codes, sales status, complaints)	Compiled from public records on one page.	Brighthouse Carrier File
I'm worried the company is failing	Investment-grade ratings, downgraded in 2025, acquisition pending; track it, don't panic on current facts.	The downgrades section above

The reliable way to know which company actually owes you a benefit is never the search results — it is the insurer named on your annual statement and declarations page, and the entity that sends your bill. If those say Brighthouse, you hold a Brighthouse policy (almost certainly SmartCare). If they say Metropolitan Life, you hold a MetLife policy, and Brighthouse's news has nothing to do with your coverage.

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