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 November is LTC Awareness Month   
 
With Halloween behind us, we officially jump to the holiday season. We might be a family business but we still look forward to getting together for a big Thanksgiving meal (Diana makes the best stuffing this side of the Rockies). In honoring the spirit of family, November is also home to Long-Term Care Awareness Month.
 
Most of your business is probably focused on other lines of protection--such as investments, life insurance, or health insurance. We are excited to offer you one month to shift that focus to LTC coverage. Our carriers have made it extremely simple to be prepared with the best in sales and marketing strategies. Those tools, in combination with your skills and a dedicated and efficient back office, offer unlimited opportunities to protect your clients' families from a financial fiasco created by the need for increasingly expensive long-term care services.
 
It's most important to remember that LTC insurance is there for your clients to use in their greatest time of need. Secondly, we must aim to keep it simple--both for ourselves as the brokers and for our clients as the consumers. Here are the salient points, the Core Four, that we should address when discussing the outline of an LTC plan: 
 
1) How Much? - Explain the price range for the current cost of care. Our carriers' Cost of Care surveys may come in handy in showing how the prices differ geographically, with the Bay Area representing one of the most inflated regions in the country. 
 
2) How Long? - To help the decision making process we can provide results from industry studies, that help you and your client do the math and see whether they should purchase LTC insurance to cover the necessary services for years and years on end, or if they should simply buy a short and fat policy.
 
3) Waiting Period - How long can they afford to wait before LTCi benefits kick in? What sounds reasonable to them?
 
4) Inflation Protection - Does your client see the value in purchasing the 5% Compound Inflation? Would they be better suited for Simple Inflation? Or perhaps a buy-up option that can be triggered at their discretion? Either way, it's important to see their benefit grow while we're watching long-term care services increase at astronomical rates. 
 
These four items make up the heart and soul of a long-term care plan. This is not a complicated subject, and the carriers all understand that these are the four pillars. Yes, policies do differ from one another in more minute ways, but the basic frame is the same in each plan: How Much?, How Long?, Waiting Period, and Inflation Protection.
 
So again, we urge you to discuss these simple points with each one of your scheduled appointments through the month of November. The purchase of a private insurance policy will give your clients the option to receive their services at home, so they are not subjected to the nursing home facilities paid by Medi-Cal. Keep having this conversation and you will realize how this simple discussion can help more families stay together through the holidays.
 
Here are several resources to guide you through LTC Awareness Month: Resource Website, Resource Page, RUReadyCA.org, Let's Talk, and third-party pieces.