What Happened to Your MetLife Long-Term Care Policy

The confusion is understandable, and the search engines make it worse. Type "MetLife long term care" into Google and you'll see Brighthouse results threaded through the answers, because the two companies share a corporate bloodline and the internet has not bothered to keep them straight. For an in-force policyholder — or the adult child trying to manage a parent's policy — this is not an academic distraction. You need to know which company owes you the benefit and which phone number to call. Here is the lineage, cleanly separated.

Why "Brighthouse" keeps showing up

Brighthouse Financial was carved out of MetLife. In 2016 MetLife announced it would separate a large part of its U.S. retail business into an independent company, and the spinoff completed in August 2017. What went into Brighthouse was the U.S. individual life-insurance and annuity retail business. Long-term care insurance was not part of that package.

Two years later, in 2019, Brighthouse introduced SmartCare — a hybrid product that combines indexed universal life insurance with a long-term care benefit rider. SmartCare is the only thing at Brighthouse that touches long-term care, and it is a brand-new product sold to new buyers. It has nothing to do with the standalone MetLife LTC policy you bought a decade or two ago. If you are reading rate-increase letters and trying to decide whether to keep your coverage, SmartCare is not your policy, not your contract, and not your decision to make. The brand overlap is the only connection.

The timeline that explains the confusion

The shape here is the same one that governs most of the long-term care market: a carrier exits new sales, and the policies it already wrote keep running for decades as a closed block. MetLife's exit in 2010 put it in the same category as Genworth, John Hancock, and Transamerica — companies that no longer sell long-term care but still owe benefits to hundreds of thousands of people. The Brighthouse spinoff is a corporate-structure event layered on top of that, and it is the layer that confuses people.

Who actually holds and services your policy now

Your policy is an obligation of Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, and MetLife continues to administer long-term care claims directly. As of 2026, MetLife runs its own LTC claims operation: the customer-service line for filing a claim is 1-888-687-0977, and the claims mailing address is P.O. Box 14407, Lexington, KY 40512. The claim flows through a MetLife benefit-intake specialist and a care coordinator — not through Brighthouse, and not through any successor company.

One nuance worth stating plainly, because it trips people up: a carrier can reinsure a block of business — transfer the financial risk to another company behind the scenes — without changing who you, the policyholder, deal with. MetLife has done large reinsurance deals in recent years (with Global Atlantic in 2023 and Chariot Re in 2025), but those covered universal life, annuity, and structured-settlement liabilities, not long-term care — and even in those transactions MetLife remained the administrator and customer-facing servicer. So far there has been no public sale or transfer of the long-term care block.

That said, administrative arrangements can change over time, and the authoritative source for your policy is your own paperwork. The insurer named on your annual statement and your policy's declarations page is the definitive answer — it will read "Metropolitan Life Insurance Company." If you ever see a notice telling you your policy has been assumed by or transferred to another carrier, treat that notice as the source of truth and confirm it directly. Absent such a notice, your policy is MetLife's.

The AARP wrinkle

A large share of these policies were sold under the AARP brand, because AARP endorsed MetLife long-term care insurance for years. If that's how you bought yours, it changes nothing about who is responsible: AARP was the endorser, not the insurer. The policy was issued by Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, and MetLife — not AARP — pays the claim and sets the premium.

The rate-increase reality on the legacy block

Like every closed block, MetLife's long-term care policies have absorbed substantial premium increases over the years, and more are likely. This is the industry norm, not a MetLife anomaly: the average requested long-term care rate increase reached roughly 56% in 2024 by one Society of Actuaries measure. If you've received a rate-hike letter, the most useful thing to understand is that it is a structured menu of options, not a single take-it-or-leave-it bill.

It's also worth being clear-eyed about what the courts have and haven't done here, because "metlife long term care class action lawsuit" is a common search and the picture is easy to misread. Two cases mark the boundaries:

• Rate increases that a regulator approved are very hard to fight. When four policyholders challenged MetLife's inflation-rider increases as misleading, a federal appeals court dismissed the case under the filed-rate doctrine — the principle that courts won't second-guess a premium a state insurance department already approved. The size of an approved increase, by itself, almost never gives you a legal claim.
• A specific broken promise is different. In Newman v. Metropolitan Life Insurance Co. (7th Cir. 2018), the policyholder had a "Reduced-Pay at 65" rider — a written promise that premiums would drop at age 65. When MetLife raised her premium afterward, the court held that MetLife had breached its contract. That win turned entirely on the specific rider language, not on the rate increase being too large.

The practical takeaway is narrow on purpose: the fact that an increase is legal — approved by your state — usually means it stands. The exception is when an increase collides with a specific written guarantee in your own rider. That's worth reading your policy for, but most policyholders won't find an actionable breach, and a rate increase alone is not one. If the math has gotten hard, the more productive question is usually whether to keep, reduce, or drop the policy — a decision that depends on your benefits, your health, and your alternatives, not on litigation.

What to do next

If you take three things from this:

• Don't lapse a policy out of confusion. A missed premium on a 15-year-old MetLife policy throws away coverage you can't buy again at today's prices. Confirm your insurer on your annual statement before you do anything.
• Call MetLife, not Brighthouse. For claims and policy questions, MetLife's long-term care line is 1-888-687-0977. Brighthouse has no record of your policy and can't help.
• Treat a rate-hike letter as a decision, not an ultimatum. There are usually four or five options inside that envelope, and the right one depends on your numbers.

For the entity-level facts on Brighthouse itself — its NAIC company codes, sales status, and complaint history — see our Brighthouse Carrier File. For the broader mechanics of what happens to your coverage when any carrier exits the market, start with what happens after a carrier stops selling.