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

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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”.

 

 

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Buyers of new LTCI policies face little risk of

Individuals who purchase a new long-term care insurance policy face little if any chance of a future
rate increase according to a study of pricing experts released Sept. 17 by the American Association for Long-Term Care Insurance (AALTCI).

“Policies priced years ago using different assumptions have seen rate increases so consumers today assume they face the same risk,” says Jesse Slome, director of AALTCI. “That’s simply not the case.”
The Los Angeles-based national organization just released results of a poll of actuaries across the long-term care insurance industry.

Full Article

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• Sorry, No Room for Your Mom
  There’s one little problem with your clients’ LTC plans: LTC services providers are in decline. Read more.
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  Mark Kantrowitz, publisher of Savingforcollege.com, explains the differences, but in most cases the winner is clear. Read more.
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  The IRS is definitely leaning toward lumping actuaries together with actors, doctors and other fancy professionals. Read more.

Long-Term-Care Insurance Isn’t Dead. It’s Now an Estate-Planning Tool

By Leslie Scism

Last year, after finishing with college tuition for their three children, Jessica Galligan Goldsmith and her husband, James, treated themselves to something she had long wanted: long-term-care insurance.

It hasn’t been cheap. The couple, both lawyers in their mid-50s, will shell out more than $320,000 between them over a decade. For that, they will be able to tap into benefits topping $1 million apiece by the time they are in their 80s, the age when many Americans suffer from dementia or other illnesses that require full-time care.

Plus, the policies pay out death benefits if long-term care isn’t ultimately needed, and most provide 10% to 20% of the original death benefit even if the long-term-care proceeds are fully tapped.

Such policies that combine long-term-care coverage with a potential life-insurance benefit are called “hybrids,” and they are reshaping the long-term-care niche of the U.S. insurance industry.

Full Article

Millennials May Care About Long-Term Care Benefits

By Allison Bell | June 27, 2018

Carriers may be afraid to sell it, but workers seem to like it almost as much as life insurance.

Workers in the “Millennial” generation — those born from 1979 to 2000 — may like seeing long-term care insurance (LTCI) options on the benefits menu even more than older workers do.
All workers combined say they like LTCI benefits almost as much as they say they like life disability insurance.

Workers seem to be much more interested in LTCI benefits than in benefits sometimes seen as LTCI substitutes, such as critical illness insurance and cancer insurance.

Full Article