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The California Long Term Care Insurance Task Force has been charged with “exploring the feasibility of developing and implementing a culturally competent statewide insurance program for long-term care services and supports.”

Maybe we’re not under attack by a militaristic, authoritarian, collectivistic rogue state as we were 80 years ago today. But ideological assaults on traditional American values like freedom and individualism are stronger than ever. It seems like most analysts and policy makers have abandoned free market principles and given up on private long-term care insurance.

LTC BULLET: THE WA CARES FUND GETS A BAD WRAP

LTC Comment: Referring to a program that now calls itself the WA Cares Fund I asked last October “What happens when the Keystone Kops design a long-term care insurance plan?”

For many of us, the purchase of our homes and the financing of our children’s college education will constitute the largest expenditures of our lives. In both of these cases, we typically use financial leverage,
i.e., debt, to attain these objectives.

While we all know there is no such thing as a unicorn, that does not stop us from writing stories, creating cartoons, and other fairy tales about them.

There is no doubt that we are in an incredibly unique, “once in a lifetime (if not century)” environment as COVID-19 continues to ravage our country, causing nearly 200,000 deaths at the time of this writing.

In the 1990s, when I began my career in the long term care insurance industry, the average age of our client was 68 years old.

Trapped at home, trying to remember what day it is, finishing the “must-do’s” for work and for the family, has prompted many people to become short-term focused.

Last week I wrote about the New Normal that has been inflicted on all of us as we deal with the Coronavirus as a global pandemic. Quite a bit has changed in a week.

How To Position Long Term Care Insurance During The Pandemic

It was the Spring of 2006 and I was participating in a senior sales leader meeting in Richmond, VA, when the president of Genworth’s long term care division announced that we would be raising rates...

We all grew up hearing the proverb that “Curiosity killed the cat.” If we were to pause and reflect on what the underlying message of this proverb of fairly-recent origin is intended to communicate, it is simply to warn of the dangers of unnecessary investigation or experimentation

As I begin a new chapter in my professional life in the long term care industry, attempting to recruit both veteran and new producers to offer all forms of long term care insurance protection, it is with a bit of nostalgia that I look back on what attracted me to the career back in the day.

Avoiding the tragedy of long-term care

Much has been written about the various generations and their buying and spending habits. From the Greatest Generation and their children, the Baby Boomers, to the Gen-Xers, the younger Gen-Yers on down to the ever growing influential force known as the Millennials

What is your outlook for the stand-alone LTCI market? In what market segments are you seeing sales activity and/ or optimism?

Many of our colleagues have recently expressed great concern over the current state of the long term care industry. Nevertheless, recognizing ample but unfulfilled opportunity beckoning just over
the horizon, they envision a golden future for us—if we embrace a necessary change in approach.

I was at the park the other day with a couple of my grandchildren and marveled that kids today still enjoy flying a kite. I no sooner had that thought and found myself recalling images of my own kite-flying as
a child, when a couple of teenagers entered the park with their sleek, shiny, and noisy drone.

Like the ocean waves, our business, long term care insurance, is about repetition. It is about calling, seeing, and helping people. Whether it is knee-to-knee or virtually via the web and telephone, as Don
Corleone once uttered, “This is the business we have chosen for ourselves.”

As I contemplate the often tumultuous and topsy-turvy long term care industry of 2018, I am reminded of how much it remains unchanged from the industry that I entered nearly twenty years ago.

Once upon a time, there was a fairy princess who lived in a very large and beautiful castle that her loving and devoted father, the King, had constructed for her and his large extended family.

Benjamin Franklin, the venerable inventor, statesman and intrepid leader, once said, “If you fail to plan, you are planning to fail!”

(Mark Twain on the state of the Long Term Care Insurance Industry.)

Last week I received a host of congratulatory LinkedIn messages on my first “anniversary” as an MGA.

A very common thing to do in the face of adversity or even the simplest forms of change is to regress and fall into the lament “remember the old days when…”

For those who don’t know who Joe DiMaggio was before he was the spokesman for Mr. Coffee, Joe D. was nicknamed “Joltin’ Joe” and “The Yankee Clipper,” and played his entire 13-year Major League Baseball career for the New York Yankees.