Perhaps a leisurely perambulation through the fevered mind of a demented and unrepentant Long Term Care Insurance Specialist is in order. A stream of consciousness laundry list of continuing frustrations that haunts our chosen corner of wholesale insurance distribution. An attempt to at least catalogue what we rise to do each day, what we attempt to accomplish, and why we insist on not giving up on what we perceive as America’s largest unprotected risk. And why, in the face of diminishing courage and sporadic commitment among the providers of independent chronic illness insurance product, we tenaciously persist.
Let’s begin with what we know for absolutely certain: “It’s all about the adult children!” The LIMRA and AHIP (longitudinal) Buyer-Non Buyer Survey paints a clear 20 year picture. Those who buy have more assets to protect, are better educated and understand that insurance leverages risk. Those who buy are those who have been touched by the caregiving angel of financial and emotional pain. The pressure of an aging population experiencing exponential growth and diminishing resources to fund that demand for care and support services is a global demographic disaster within every industrialized nation on earth. Diminishing birth rates compounded by extended medical longevity continues to fuel a crisis of available caregiving resources.
- What if insurance product actually did not matter? If you are waiting for the perfect new insurance innovation to finally solve the sales deficit conundrum—“forget about it.” Product is not the problem or the answer.
- What if we could acknowledge that technology is merely a tool for better service and does not take on a life of it’s own, but that efficient and fast delivery does contribute to success?
- What if we could finally come to accept the notion that chronic risk abrogation is a market unto itself? It is not an additional or corollary conversation added on to some other sale.
- What if we could simply acknowledge that long term care insurance, as HIPAA has so carefully and thoughtfully explained, is health insurance? Because if we had universal certification and mandatory agent training, much of the rationalization for ADBR strategies would evaporate.
- What if we openly admit that choice of product solution is not a popularity contest?
- What if every initial conversation with a prospect should begin with a careful analysis of the best 1035 strategy to upgrade protection?
- What if we finally internalize the concept that the center of our future sales universe is a dedicated focus on the adult children of those already in need or about to begin that journey?
- What if we could embrace the notion that it is “never too late” to help those in need? We must change our thinking and our focus to counsel, advise and explain all the options to help those directly involved in the reality of the claim—medically underwritten SPIA’s leveraging existing assets, reverse mortgages, real estate leveraging strategies, life settlements designed to provide care funding, VA Benefit assistance, bridge loans and even Medicaid annuities.
- What if it is simply time to put on our Wellington’s and wade directly into the heart of the claim beast itself?
I would humbly submit for your kind consideration that everyone observing your efforts will become predisposed to be better prepared themselves. It’s the adult children. It has always been the adult children.
Other than that I have no opinion on the subject.
