“The time was yesterday,” Johnson said.

As America approaches 2011, when the first wave of baby boomers will retire, the urgency of finding long-term care solutions that will work without imposing un unsupportable tax burden on the country only grows, she added.

Johnson said her bill will help working families afford long term care insurance and spread the high costs of care among a larger number of people.

But a report prepared by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a liberal think-tank, charged that tax deductions are meaningless since most of the people who cannot afford long-term care insurance typically do not earn enough to pay income tax.

The proposed bill would provide a tax deduction on premiums paid for long-term care insurance. The tax break would also apply to premiums paid through employer-offered “cafeteria plans,” which allow workers to choose from a buffet of benefit options, and to flexible spending accounts, which allow workers to set aside pre-tax money to cover an array of health care costs.

The bill would also give people who require assistance with a number of aspects of daily living, and their caregivers, a $3,000 tax credit. The credit would be phased out for individuals with incomes above $75,000 and for couples with incomes above $150,000.

Meanwhile, a 2001 study conducted by the American Association of Retired Persons shows that many Americans over 45 are ignorant of the costs of long term care, and that many people assume their long-term needs are covered when, in fact, they aren’t.

Thirty-one percent of those surveyed indicated they had insurance that covered long-term care, but only 6 percent of Americans purchases long-term care insurance prior to 1998, according to the Health Insurance Association of America.

The study of 1,800 Americans was conducted by telephone, with a margin of error of 3 percent. The AARP, which endorsed Johnson’s legislation, estimates that nursing home care can cost as much as $55,000 annually.

Similar bills were proposed in both houses of Congress during the last session, but never went anywhere. There are a thousand ways a bill can die, but Johnson was optimistic Wednesday about the chances of getting hers passed despite Congress’s attention being focused elsewhere on the Bush administration’s tax cut package. Still, she said she hoped the congressional leadership would make long term care a priority.

The provisions in the Johnson-Pomeroy bill are remarkably similar to some proposed by President Bush in his 2004 budget, which may help give the bill a boost.

While Johnson declined to guess at the cost of the bill Wednesday, estimates for the two versions proposed last year ranged in the neighborhood of $33.5 billion over 10 years.

Those costs could be offset if more Americans choose to pay for long-term care insurance, since that would mean fewer people relying on state and federal Medicaid dollars to pay for their care, said Daniel C. Adcock of the National Association of Retired Federal Employees at the news conference.