LTC Bullet:  The LTC Graduate Seminar

Friday, May 4, 2012

Tampa, Florida—

LTC Comment:  Check out our newly updated version of the Center for Long-Term Care Reform’s classic “LTC Graduate Seminar,” after the ***news.***

*** THE ERIE, PENNSYLVANIA ESTATE PLANNING COUNCIL welcomed Steve Moses on Monday, May 1, 2012 to deliver a speech titled “Why Everything You Think You Know About Long-Term Care is Wrong.”  A warm welcome preceded Steve’s talk and hearty appreciation followed, including a beautiful framed picture of a Great Lakes tall ship as a speaker’s gift.  We thank Jeff Evans of Evans Capital Management, Inc. for arranging the program. ***

*** GENWORTH NEWS:  “Michael Fraizer, the chairman and chief executive of Genworth Financial Inc. (GNW), resigned abruptly on Tuesday, two weeks after the insurance company postponed a plan to raise funds by selling shares of an Australian subsidiary. . . . Fraizer had led the company since before it was spun off by General Electric Co. (GE) in 2004, and had remained at the helm through the financial crisis, when Genworth's U.S. mortgage-insurance unit began posting hundreds of millions in operating losses.  The company had struggled to get back on track, causing investors to punish Genworth's stock and, at times, publicly complain about the pace of the recovery.  Shares had been down by 50% in the past year and 83% in the past five years.  . . .  One of the nation's biggest sellers of mortgage and long-term-care insurance, the Richmond, Va.,-based company was among the harder hit insurers when the real-estate bubble burst, thanks to its large exposure to the nation's housing woes through its U.S. mortgage insurer. . . .  ‘Mike Frazier is an extremely capable individual but unfortunately, all of these businesses’ have proven problematic, said Andrew Kligerman, a stock analyst at UBS Securities.  Kligerman nonetheless said he was ‘kind of stunned’ by Fraizer's departure.”  (Erik Holm, “Update: Genworth CEO Resigns Abruptly, CFO Takes Over For Now,” Wall Street Journal, May 1, 2012) ***

*** SPOTLIGHT ON:  Medicaid and Medicare Key Numbers
Need the latest Medicaid and Medicare numbers? Your Center for Long-Term Care Reform has you covered. We have current data, updated annually, all the way back to the early 1990s. In this feature you not only have a historical archive of essential Medicaid and Medicare numbers, you have access to the current numbers as soon as they are released. The Medicaid and Medicare Key Numbers feature is located in our Members-Only Zone website. If you need your user name and password, or are not yet a member and would like to join, click here or simply contact Damon (206-283-7036 / damon@centerltc.com). Zone in today and you’ll find a wealth of useful resources! ***

 

LTC BULLET:  THE LTC GRADUATE SEMINAR

LTC Comment:  Remember the Center for Long-Term Care Reform's 2008 National Long-Term Care Consciousness Tour?  Steve Moses criss-crossed the country in the Silver Bullet of Long-Term Care, a 16-ft. Airstream trailer towed by a silver FJ Cruiser.  Check out some pictures here and a slide show here.

One of the highlights of our LTC Tour was the “Long-Term Care Graduate Seminar” which Steve Moses presented dozens of times to audiences of aspiring “AMGs.”  (That’s Steve’s term for the “altruistic, masochistic geniuses” who endeavor to sell long-term care insurance, a product the government still gives away after the insurable event has occurred.)

In response to popular demand from audience members, we published a transcript of the two-hour grad seminar and posted it on the Center’s website in 2009.  We’ve now posted an updated version of the program here.  Check it out.  Here’s what you’ll find:

  • "The Elephant, The Blind Men and Long-Term Care" 
    • Do you understand LTC from the perspectives of all key interest groups:  government, the public, Medicaid planners, senior advocacy groups, LTC providers, LTC financiers and insurance carriers? 
    • If not, you may be like the blind men who identified an elephant as a hose, a rope, or the broadside of a barn, depending on which part of the animal they touched.
    • Our LTC grad seminar takes apart the puzzling “elephant of long-term care” and puts it back together in a way that makes much more sense.
  • Answers to three key questions:

1.      Why does the public remain asleep about the risk and cost of long-term care?

2.      Why are they about to be shocked awake?

3.      How can you help more people protect themselves in the meantime?

·        History of Long-Term Care and Why it Matters for Financial Advisors and LTCI Producers

    • How did we come to have a welfare-financed, nursing-home-based LTC system in the wealthiest country in the world where no one wants to go to a nursing home but most people remain oblivious to LTC risk and cost?
    • Why didn’t a strong home and community-based services infrastructure develop in the USA when most people would rather receive care at home?
    • Why didn’t private long-term care insurance penetrate 75% of its potential market as the actuaries originally predicted in the 1970s?
    • What does the history of long-term care suggest will happen next?
  • The “Welfare Paradigm” and the “Entitlement Paradigm”
    • Understand the difference between these two ways of looking at the long-term care issue and you’re on your way to helping more people insure for LTC.
    • Read this section of the “LTC Graduate Seminar” for a true “Aha!” experience.
  • “Key Money”
    • Ever wonder how “elder lawyers” sell Medicaid to their affluent clients despite the welfare program’s reputation for third-class, nursing home care?
    • They use “key money” and you’d better know what that is if you’re going to compete with them.
  • Did you know Social Security is a major funder of long-term care?  Do you know how Medicare props up Medicaid LTC? 
    • If not, you’d better read this section of the LTC grad seminar fast, because these facts represent two of the biggest vulnerabilities your clients face!
  • What’s going to happen next?
    • It doesn’t take a crystal ball to see what’s in store for long-term care financing.  But it does take some savvy, out-of-the-box analysis.
    • That’s exactly what you’ll find in the closing section of the LTC graduate seminar.
    • It means the end of “social insurance” as we’ve known it and the “welfarization” of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.

I hope we’ve inspired you to take a closer look at the “LTC Graduate Seminar.”  Steve Moses also conducts a full-day version of the grad seminar.  If you’d like to have him deliver either version to your group live and in person, contact Damon at 206-283-7036 or damon@centerltc.com to schedule the program.