Industry Articles

• The Value of Prospects Who Don’t Close
  Sometimes, the best prospects are the ones who, originally, got away. Read more.
• Worry of Waning Retirement Income Big Reason for Annuity Purchases: Study
  LIMRA says younger workers are more skeptical about Social Security. Read more.

30 Facts to know About Long-Term Care Planning

Insights from American consumers and advisors

As more and more Americans continue to have personal experiences with loved ones needing care or becoming a relative’s caregiver, the need to have a personal plan for care is becoming more evident. We interviewed consumers and advisors from around the nation about their perspectives on long-term care, and they shared these thoughts.

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Long-term care and government benefits: What you need to know.

Americans are now living longer compared to 40 years ago.¹ Living longer means you’re able to spend more time with people you love – but it’s also raising a new question: how to

pay for long-term care if you need it. As you get older, you will want to evaluate all of your options and develop a strategy to pay for long-term care so you aren’t caught off-guard by the costs

of needing help as you age. The U.S. government currently offers several programs that provide varying long-term care benefits, which can serve as a starting point for many

Americans – but, because you may not be eligible, or they may not cover all your expenses, it’s important to understand what benefits they provide to ensure your long-term care needs can be met.

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4 Top Medicare Advantage Mini LTC Benefits

By Allison Bell                        

Insurers have not rushed all that many new benefits that resemble long-term care (LTC) benefits into their 2019 Medicare Advantage plans — but they have added some.

Analysts from Avalere Health, a health care consulting firm, have come up with some Medicare Advantage mini LTC benefits offering counts. The analysts put the counts in a new Medicare Advantage supplemental benefits update.

What’s new here?

Traditionally, Medicaid has covered nursing home care. Medicare has covered home medical care, but it has not covered non-medical home care — such as help with dressing, or meal delivery services — that might help people cope with the lack of ability to handle the “activities of daily living.”

Last spring, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) freed insurers to add some  “homemaker services” to their benefits packages, by telling insurers that it would let them add benefits addressing the “social determinants of care” and the needs of people with chronic conditions to their Medicare Advantage plan benefits packages.

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4 types of objections that derail salespeople (and how to deal with them)

By Jeb Blount 

October 15, 2018

No may be a tiny word, but for salespeople it’s the most dreaded word in the English language. Nothing causes your heart to sink quite like an objection from a prospective client. This is true not just because it presages a negative impact on your income, but also because it’s incredibly painful to hear. It’s no coincidence that “objection” rhymes with “rejection” — and the latter is one of the deepest, darkest, most primal human fears.

There’s no way to avoid objections. They’re going to happen. What you can do is learn how to rise above the emotional disruption they cause and, hopefully, salvage the sale.

There are four types of objections you encounter in the sales process, and they occur at various points in the journey. They can stop a sale before it ever gets started, derail your efforts in the middle of the conversation, or shut down the deal at the end after weeks, even months, of hard work.

The good news is that when you arm yourself with an arsenal of turnaround frameworks, you can face these roadblocks and get past them so you can move onto the next stage.

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15 Worst Cities for Nursing Home Quality

By Allison Bell        October 16, 2018 at 11:08 AM

One way local, live-human financial professionals can set themselves apart from the robots is to know what’s going on inside area long-term care (LTC) facilities.

Whether clients are buying long-term care insurance, annuities, life insurance policies that offer LTC benefits, or a diversified portfolio of mutual funds, the odds that some of the clients’ resources will go to pay for LTC services are high.

You can learn a lot about LTC service providers by visiting facilities, and by talking to the people who use the facilities and services.

You can also learn something by visiting the federal government’s data.medicare.gov site. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), the agency that runs Medicare and Medicaid, has stuffed that site full of data on the quality of all kinds of care providers, including home health care providers.

To laser in on nursing home quality measures, try the CMS Nursing Home Compare site. You can search for a nursing home by name, list all of the nursing homes in a specific area, or download an entire nursing home quality information dataset. One of the nursing home quality datasets, the Provider Info dataset, offers 79 columns of information on about 15,600 different nursing home care providers. The dataset was last updated in September.

For a list of the communities that look the worst, in terms of quality, to us — based on three-year federal fine totals — see the data cards in the slideshow above.

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Classroom Ethics Course

All Illinois resident producers are required to complete 24 hours of CE with 3 of those hours consisting of classroom ethics. Resource Brokerage, LLC will be holding an ethics classroom presentation that fulfills the state’s requirement. The program will consist of an in-depth discussion of ethics as they pertain to the independent insurance agent.

The program is designed to be interactive and the instructor encourages class attendees to participate in discussions of the different ethical/unethical scenarios that will be presented.

Monday, October 22, 2018     9:00am to Noon

Schaumburg Corporate Conference Center Conference Rooms A and B. 1501 E. Woodfield Road Schaumburg, IL 60173

RSVP below or via phone to Judy Wrigley: 847-598-0039

RSVP

Additional Details:

For brokers (or assistants) that have produced for us in the last two years, there is no charge IF REGISTERED IN ADVANCE. For all other interested individuals, a non-refundable $60 registration fee will be charged (exception: if you place a piece of business through our agency within 60 days of the seminar, the registration fee will be refunded to you).

Same day registration (subject to availability): $80 cash or check. No discounts will be honored for same day “walk ins”.