KIRKLAND, Wash. — Consumers and professionals with an interest in long term care insurance need no longer dig so hard for information. Now they can do as the pros do: have the information come to them, in bits and pieces as it develops. “We’re happy to share our secrets,” says Jonas Roeser, Senior Vice President of Marketing & Operations for LTC Financial Partners LLC (LTCFP), one of America’s most experienced long term care insurance agencies.
One of two methods is setting up the Google Alerts system to deliver periodic notifications of Internet postings on the subject. Google Alerts is a beta service of Google; it provides email updates of the latest relevant Google results (web, news, etc.) based on any choice of query or topic. Focusing on long term care insurance, as Roeser and his colleagues do, provides benefits such as –
* Learning which insurance carriers are most active in the LTC field.
* Finding which carriers are soundest in the current economy, and which are struggling.
* Keeping up on new benefit options and premium costs.
* Finding why more and more individuals and companies are including LTC protection in their forward planning.
* Tracking the trend toward offloading LTC costs from Medicaid to the private sector.
* Getting the latest on tax legislation and emerging State Partnership programs that offer lucrative incentives.
To set up Google Alerts as Roeser recommends —
1. Go to http://www.google.com/alerts.
2. In the Search terms field, enter the words: “long term care insurance”.
3. For Type, select “Comprehensive,” “News,” “Blogs,” “Video,” or another content-type choice.
4. For How often, choose “once a day,” “once a week,” or “as-it-happens.”
5. Then enter your email address in the Send to field, and you’re done.
The second method of keeping up is even simpler. Just visit the industry’s new social network, the Long Term Care Insurance Guild, at http://www.ltcguild.com, and view the news alerts posted there. “I make it a habit to visit LTC Guild often, usually once or more a day,” says Roeser. “So do hundreds of other pros, ranging from LTC agents to carrier executives to people in allied fields such as financial advice.”
To find the alerts on the LTC Guild site, just click on Long Term Care Insurance NEWS in the middle of the home page, toward the top.
