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Are you considering offering group long term care insurance to your employees or executive team? Then you’ve come to the right place. Long term care insurance is unique in that it is an extra addition to a medical plan but also helps to protect the employees retirement savings.
There are many reasons to offer long term care insurance to your employees as a benefit. They include:
- Premium Discounts – Your employees will be able to purchase a needed insurance and won’t have to pay as much for it!
- More Favorable Underwriting – It happens all the time. Someone starts entering their retiring years and starts to look at long term care insurance. Unfortunately their health immediately disqualifies them. This is unfortunate for those who have seen a loved one spend through their life savings because of not having long term care insurance. By having more favorable underwriting it allows your employees to get coverage who normally might be disqualified.
- Better Purchase Experience – An employee who purchases through a group plan gets a more structured education on long term care and becomes more equipped to make a strategic decision.
- Unisex Premium rates – Many carriers have one rate for both male and female. Premiums are typically more expensive for women so this can save your women employees significant amounts of money in premiums.
Some basics to know about long term care insurance…
- There’s a 69{1ce0a9d4de1ea39c5bb28f142478b8eed0af63b9bd510bbbcfe7dfa250eb8dfe} that an individual will need long term care in their lifetime. Because of this, long term care insurance has the highest utilization rate of any other insurance.
- Many conditions such as Alzheimer’s, Dementia, Parkinson’s Disease, Chronic Health Conditions, and Mental deterioration can lead someone to needing help with care. Medicare does not cover the cost of assisted living, home care, and nursing homes. Purchasers of long term care insurance buy a “Pool of Money” that provides payments for their long term care should they need it.
- Policies can allow for Partnership Protection through the State’s Medicaid program. This means that if a retiree purchased a long term care insurance partnership policy that had a pool of money worth $350,000 and ended up using the entire coverage, then Medicaid would only make the couple spend down to $352,000 instead of $2,000, thus protecting a retirees nest egg from the state and preventing them from going broke.
Here is what the process looks like for an enrollment strategy to introduce a new offering of group long term care insurance:
- Employer Commitment – It all starts with the employer engaged and committed to the education program so everyone who can benefit from it has the appropriate opportunity.
- Email program that provides information, premium rates, and other deadline information will keep everyone informed and on the right track.
- Face to face seminars, lunch n learns, or scheduled webinars for proper employee education.
- Call center and email support with long term care specialists throughout entire process. 1 on 1 meetings with employees and their spouses.
- On-line enrollment with online chat
- Payroll deduction is available and desirable by most employees but direct billing to participants is also available.
- Ongoing Enrollment Strategy
- Employees get to take their policy with them when they leave your company.
Are you interested in an executive group long term care insurance plan?
Group long term care insurance is not subject to non-discrimination rules of ERISA. This can make it much easier and simple to carve out exactly who you’d like to have on an executive plan. A simple corporate resolution and unique eligibility classes can help a company pick who they want to be in the plan. Executives will like that employer paid long term care benefits are not counted as income. They also can add extended family members to the plan, and even have options to have policies paid in full over 10 years or by age 65 so they retire with a fully funded plan.
I’d be happy to help you strategically carve out a plan for your company or executives.
Are you an employer that has a current long term care insurance group plan?
If you already have a current long term care insurance plan you might want to consider changing it. There are many reasons to do this:
- Many carriers have pulled out of the long term care insurance market and are not offering coverage to new employees or won’t offer coverage to employees who didn’t participate in the initial offering.
- Some carriers have increased rates on their in force policies.
- There are new options in long term care such as the ability to pay a cash benefit to a spouse for care if needed.
I’d be happy to provide an analysis of your current in force coverage and then compare it to what is being offered today.