November is Long Term Care Insurance Awareness Month, the campaign aimed at educating Americans about the importance of owning long-term-care insurance (LTCI). This is an excellent opportunity to reach out to your clients and prospects about LTCI and expand your LTCI practice.

NAIFA’s New LECP Center

Coming soon is NAIFA’s Limited and Extended Care Planning Center, a website that will serve as a virtual center and one-stop resource for enhancing consumers’ understanding of limited, extended and long-term care solutions, and providing better communication between advisors and consumers. The LECP Center will also showcase the latest innovations and developments of the industry’s service providers.

While agents and advisors are upping their game and turning to social media to market and promote their LTC products, this fragmentation is causing them to waste precious time looking for information—time that is a scarce commodity for everyone. The LECP Center will address this issue by enabling advisors and agents to access the information they are looking for as quickly and as effortlessly as possible.

In addition to showcasing the latest industry innovations, the LECP Center will allow NAIFA to act as a voice for the industry through its highly effective advocacy program. Effective advocacy is essential for industry success and NAIFA is the only organization that represents all agents and advisors, regardless of the products they sell or the focus of their practice.

LTCI prices to remain steady

And finally, something that will be good news to your prospects and clients is the fact that buyers of new long-term care insurance policies face little risk of a future rate increase

This is according to a study of pricing experts released 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," explains Jesse Slome, director of the Association.  "That's simply not the case."  The national organization just released results of a poll of actuaries across the long-term-care insurance industry.

"Most actuaries responding see little or no to the risk of needing future rate increases on recently priced policies," according to Slome.  Some 80 percent of the responding actuaries expressed the risk was 10 percent or less.

Older long-term care insurance policies priced 10 or 20 years ago used different pricing assumptions and generally had specific policy provisions that necessitated the need for increases.

"Back in the 1990s, long-term care insurance was a new form of protection and there just wasn't the data available," Slome notes.  "With several decades of experience and millions of policies sold and hundreds of thousands of claimants, policies priced today can more accurately project important aspects."

"I believe the risk of a future rate increases is zero," projects Slome.  "Rising interest rates and the new regulations mean someone purchasing a new long-term care insurance policy in 2018 and 2019 faces little, if any, chance of a future rate increase," Slome projects.

"Older policies with provisions like unlimited policy benefits or compounded annual benefit increases of five percent may face rate increases, but even these are never take-it or leave-it propositions.  Insurers always offer options that enable the policyholder to avoid the increase."

For the study, the American Association for Long-Term Care Insurance polled nearly 80 LTC industry actuaries.  The professionals who price insurance policies were asked for their assessment of policies now being sold, which were priced during the past two years.

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