If you're an agent selling major medical insurance, long-term care insurance or other health-related products, you may feel unloved right now. But, whether or not anyone has the cash to pay you, both the insurers and consumers need you now more than ever.
You help insurers make money by using capital to patch the holes in the plastic sheeting of wages, savings and government programs that protect consumers against financial devastation. The consumers' plastic sheeting is still so flimsy that, according to the Commonwealth Fund, 16 percent of U.S. adults ages 19 to 64 with income over 400 percent of the federal poverty level put off getting dental care in 2016 because of worries about the cost. Ten percent of those "high-income adults" put off going to a doctor when they were sick.
Insurers, meanwhile, face two huge constrants on what they can sell safely: lingering low interest rates, which smother long-term care insurance, long-term disability insurance and other long-duration products; and Affordable Care Act chaos.
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Allison Bell
Allison Bell, a senior reporter at ThinkAdvisor and BenefitsPRO, previously was an associate editor at National Underwriter Life & Health. She has a bachelor's degree in economics from Washington University in St. Louis and a master's degree in journalism from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. She can be reached through X at @Think_Allison.
