Long Term Care Concierge

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This is the Truth Network. Welcome to Finishing Wealth, brought to you by cardinalguide.com, with certified financial planner, Hans Scheil, best-selling author and financial planner, helping families finish well for over 40 years. On Finishing Wealth, we'll examine both biblical and practical knowledge to assist families in finishing wealth, including discussions on managing social security, Medicare, IRAs, long-term care, life insurance, investments, and taxes. Now let's get started with Finishing Wealth. Welcome to Finishing Wealth and certified financial planner, Hans Scheil and today's show.

Wow, you're gonna love this. I love it. I can tell you I've lived it, so I know I love it, is long-term care concierge. That's a word you haven't heard about except in hotels.

But man, what I found out recently that the insurance companies are doing with this issue is huge. And so when you hear that word concierge, you're thinking, wow, I've just checked into the hotel and I need some help. Well, can you imagine that if you had a long-term care concierge? So we're gonna talk about that, and it begs the question, why should we need such a thing? Well, we're gonna get into that, but I want you to think about the real long-term care concierge that God gave you as a result of Jesus Christ coming, and he's gonna seal you with the Holy Spirit.

And talk about a long-term care concierge. And what's his job is? To help you through the process of life to get sanctified and to grow in your relationship with Jesus. And how he does that to a great extent, when you think about it, and he does it for me, I can just tell you that, you know, I sit down to read the Bible this morning, honestly, and I'm looking at this passage, and it makes no sense to me whatsoever. And so he gets in there and he begins to take me through what is an extremely complicated process to understand what it is God is trying to show me.

Why? Because he knows how important my faith is to my being where he wants me to be today. Like, I need to hang on to Jesus, but in order to do that, I gotta believe Jesus is the answer to my situation. Well, the Holy Spirit is there in this complicated process to show me how critical he is to what my next step may be today. And so, with all that said, wow, I mean, how exciting is it to me that the insurance companies, at least two of them that you represent, are offering these services? And there's more, I mean, there really is a lot more than just a concierge, right? Well, there is. I mean, and so the history of this claims concierge, which the two insurance companies that we talk about in the YouTube video are One America and Nationwide, and both of them are very large players in the hybrid long-term care insurance marketplace, okay? And we write business for both of them, and we use them quite a bit, and they are getting out ahead of the claims process and really wanting to provide a service to their clients at the very time that they need it.

I mean, think about it. You buy long-term care insurance. I'm gonna provide it. You buy it from me. I'm gonna provide all the service you need. You're probably never gonna correspond with One America or Nationwide or anybody else that we use. We're gonna write up the policy, fund it, explain it to you, and then it's probably gonna be several years before you're actually using the thing.

Maybe not, but most likely, and then when this happens that you're gonna use it, many times it's not you that's communicating with the insurance company, it's your kids. Right, and I can't help, as I said, we live this, and so you may be sitting there thinking, well, you know, I'm not concerned about long-term care, you know, and what in the heck does a concierge have to do with that? And so let me put it in perspective for you, okay? So we've been the caregivers from my mother-in-law for, oh, five years, literally. And, you know, last week on Wednesday, you know, she had a situation with her COPD where she started building up carbon dioxide to the point that we had to get an ambulance out there to get her, and the next thing we know, she's in intensive care for four days. But the problem is, her problem with her carbon dioxide is she can no longer think rationally at all. I mean, she can't even operate her phone. She couldn't make a phone call, you know, to tell you something, better yet, you know, figure out what my next step is. And unfortunately, due to the Medicare situations and all that, they've got to get her out of the hospital. But where exactly do we go with her?

Because she really can't walk easily. And, you know, she's got to have a very expensive machine in order to get this help. And so my wife is trying to figure out between palliative care, between Medicare, between all these different cares of, you know, how can I get her help?

She is in no position to figure out what she needs next or where it's going. And it really comes down to the hospital's got to get her out of there. And so Sunday, what happened was, they just said, well, you know, you need to get her out. You know, we're going to send the fire department there in Stokesdale to help get her from the car to inside your house. And so my wife brings her home.

I was preaching that morning. And so I get home before they do. Eventually, an elder gets there. The fire department's there, right? The fire department's losing their mind when she gets there. They're like, she doesn't need to be out of the hospital. This woman could barely walk, her oxygen's this blah, blah, blah. You're going to have to have an ambulance to get her because we need some kind of chair that does something I don't understand, right? And all I'm saying is, there's a whole lot of cautionary that could have been done. There's a whole lot of healthcare questions that we, and again, we've been through this with my dad, and I understand a lot about the process. But I still pull it off.

It's a horse of a different color. And you're not the person to do that because you're not exactly in a great state. Well, all this is going on with the hospital and the ambulance and the four days in the hospital and all that kind of stuff.

And neither is your wife. And so this whole claims concierge was created really around the claims process. Okay, so the roots of it is, or are that people have had difficulty getting their claims paid on their long-term care policies. That's no secret, that it's just insurance companies. You've had difficulty getting your claims paid with any kind of insurance company because it's just, and you may perceive that difficulty that the insurance company is trying to avoid paying the claim when many times they just might be in the insurance company. They just take forever to do stuff and they pay for you to death and you send in more stuff.

They ask for more stuff and it goes back and forth. And so they created these two mutual insurance companies, One America and Nationwide created, they said, what we're going to do is we're going to create a one point of contact person that's there for our customers. These are mutual insurance companies by definition.

They're in business to serve the people that own their company. And so they created a quarterback position and a one point of communication for the claims, but it's grown to be much larger than just getting the claim paid and facilitating that. It really includes three things that this claims concierge or this concierge for you through the insurance company is number one, it's care coordination. So, you know, that's kind of a sterile kind of word care coordination, you know, and I just, I listened to that. What this is really talking about is finding somebody to actually come out to your house and care for her.

Okay. And, or it's, uh, sending somebody out to do a care assessment and to sit down with you and look at your needs, communicate with your doctor and with the hospital and the discharge and to look at her needs personally and the oxygen and, and, and to write out a whole care plan, say, this is what she needs done for her at home. And this is who's going to do it, or these are your choices for companies that are going to send people in different people at different times, doing different things. I mean, that's, that's what a client, a care coordinator does. And in one America's case, they actually use a company called care scout and care scout makes a business as any of you, if you have this need, or you could have done this last week is you could have called care scout and set up and you could engage them.

You'd have to pay them in this case. One America pays the care scout people. So they're local people that their business is setting up the home healthcare agency, setting up the assisted living. If you need to go there, setting up the nursing home, setting up the care assessment, just generally all around your care needs. So, you know, another thing that fits, it fits into this as I've experienced it is you have something called palliative care. You have something called hospice, you know, you have home healthcare, you have, um, there's one where they help you rehabilitate, you know, they do physical therapy and then there's occupational therapy and there's all, there's all these different kinds of therapies that are all part of this process that Medicare may pay or your, you know, your long-term care may pay. And so a coordinator sounds really good to me.

I'm telling you, cause I've been down this road. Oh yeah. And most of the things you just mentioned are skilled care, palliative care, hospice, um, occupational therapy. Those are things that Medicare typically will pay for. What I'm talking about mainly here is the custodial care, the, the just getting her from the car to the house and then getting her set up and getting her a bath and getting her medicines and getting her oxygen machine all set up and there and replenishing it and just going about the activities of daily living. Fancy machine. Now it's a CPAP thing and it takes about a rocket scientist to look at the signals.

Yeah, I'm with you. Yeah. So, so that's care coordination. Then they also do caregiver support, which is really is I imagine you and your wife at this point in time could use some caregiver support. And that that's an active process of most people are running on empty when they've been looking after a loved one for a period of time, they're almost like a baby.

And you know, they're like a young mother that has been doing the care all by herself and she's not looked after her own needs. And then finally claims coordination. So they're a quarterback person that, and when we get on the other side of the break, we can talk a little bit about the actual claims coordination and what they, what they do for you.

Yeah. Well, you can see there's a whole mouthful in this idea of long-term care, concierge and again, we haven't even got into how cool the policy is that goes with these hybrid policies that we've talked about. So we've got a whole lot to talk about coming up the next segment, but we want to remind you that there's a wonderful, wonderful video shows you all sorts of brochures and information about this claims concierge. It's at cardinalguide.com.

You can just click on, you know, the seven worries tabs, which this would be the long-term care tab. And there you're going to see a video on as well as the show notes and all this information about today's subject of long-term care concierge, as well as other shows and all sorts of stuff there at cardinalguide.com, which always includes Hans's book, The Complete Cardinal Guide to Planning for and Living in Retirement is also there at cardinalguide.com. And again, to me, there's just no substitute to being able to just like, wow, I could email Hans, I could call Hans, you go to cardinalguide.com and you have somebody that is, you know, coordinated getting the coordinator. And, you know, believe me, wow, you know, what a helpful thing.

So we'll be right back with a whole lot more Finishing Well. Hans and I would love to take our show on the road to your church, Sunday school, Christian or civic room. Here's a chance for you to advance the Kingdom through financial resources by leveraging Hans expertise in qualified charitable contributions, veterans aid and attendance, IRAs, Social Security, Medicare and long-term care. Just go to cardinalguide.com and contact Hans to schedule a live recording of Finishing Well at your church, Sunday school, Christian or civic group.

Contact Hans at cardinalguide.com, that's cardinalguide.com. Welcome back to Finishing Well, a certified financial planner, Hans Scheil, and today's show is long-term care concierge, which is a word that, you know, I'm, the more I say it Hans, the more I like that word. It's, I could use a few concierge, that's for sure. When I was traveling for business, once in a while I got to stay at the Ritz-Carlton. Some meeting would be there, we'd be having some function and it's very expensive and I wouldn't necessarily say it's a good investment of money, but nonetheless, I'm there and a thing that always just sticks out is that concierge. It's, you know, sometimes a man, sometimes a woman, very well dressed that's standing there in a little booth and they're not like sitting there with a line in front of them, they're just there and they greet you and you walk up and you can take any problem that you have going on and their job is to make it go away or to fix it or to, I watched one time this concierge when I was staying at the Ritz-Carlton in Palm Springs that there's this guy that came that was, you know, probably kind of a big deal, you know, I mean, just you could tell by his countenance and I always, you know, I always like to sit and watch those kind of guys because, you know, concierges are kind of made for them and the guy walks up and says, you know, my limo is supposed to be here and it's not and I've got a flight in, you know, in so many minutes and he wasn't very happy and so the concierge looks at him and he says, sir, I will drive you myself and then he called somebody at the front desk, he just motioned him, the guy from the front desk moved over to the concierge spot, concierge grabbed the keys, went outside, put the guy in there and took him to the airport and I thought that's impressive.

Well, yeah, there you go. I mean, that's what a concierge does is that makes your life smoother and so when we take this into the real world that these insurance companies getting out ahead of the thing, we talked on the first part of the show about the three functions of this concierge. One is care coordination is to get somebody at the local level and for them to communicate with them and pay for them to set up care, you know, that's coordination and they're going to arrange for the home health care agency, do the care assessment, a whole list of things. Secondly, caregiver support and we don't talk about this enough but people that have been providing care themselves are usually run down, they're running on empty, they need help making sure they get proper nutrition, that they get exercise, they get some recreation. Yeah, my wife who is the caregiver for her mother, you know, she was at the hospital for four days, you know, she came home yesterday or Sunday when she came home and it's a true story, man. I mean, she came in the house and she said, I'm so shaky, I haven't eaten anything all day.

Of course, she hadn't, right? Yeah, I said, here, you sit on the couch, well, I'll figure out what's going on with Nelda, I got her some food, I said, you just sit there and just, you know, you know, and there that is. I mean, get that picture in your mind that that's your spouse or that's your children and they're worried sick because they've been with you in the hospital for all these days and like, man, here it is, it's real time that they need help and these things are huge. Well, when I've sat in this role before, being the care coordinator or setting up those people or providing for caregiver support, I've found a lot of times is I need to be a salesman. I mean, I've got to sit down with the care coordination, I got to sell this to the patient, okay?

It's like, you know, you need help and you need help from somebody other than your spouse or your daughter or whoever that is getting run down. So there's a sales job here of going on to actually get them to accept the care. Same with the caregiver is when I'm sitting down looking at this whole thing, they think I'm coming out only to talk about and with the patient and now the caregiver is the person that really needs some help and they need some talking to that you need to take advantage of this support and part of the support is just sending in people to do what you've been doing otherwise so that you can take care of yourself. And then the third thing that they do is really what they talk about in the brochure is they're the quarterback, they're the point of contact and this is where the problems existed historically with long-term care claims is, you know, the claims department, that's just what claims people do is they write for more information or they write to tell you that you didn't fill out the form properly, they need this question answered and that question answered and then you answer it and then you send it in and they either didn't receive it or it wasn't done properly and then you can't communicate with them or, you know, and it's just, it creates a perception on the part of the consumer that the insurance company is trying to avoid the claim and it may look like that, the reality is they're just doing their job and so this quarterback person, this concierge, they're a central point of contact, all you got to do is talk to them, they'll call over there and talk to the person and say what do we need specifically and then they're going to get a list emailed to them and then they're going to call you or call your daughter or son, whoever's handling this and say okay, we need these three things, I'm going to email them to you and can I help you get these and when you get them, send them to me and I'll send them over to claims.

I mean that type of stuff and it makes the whole process very, very smooth. Oh, believe me, it's, you know, it's part of life that's going to happen with your spouse, you know, as it might happen to you, you know, whatever the situation may be and I loved what you talked about in the video, Hans, that you had this guy, you said he could have bought the nursing home. Yeah, I mean, so he's a gentleman that I helped with Medicare and I just, we're going to put him up as a case study and so he, he taught, he's a client and calling in annually about Medicare, okay, and he's not too happy about a few things, not with his Medicare insurance but with Irma and what that's going on and navigating that for him and his wife and so we tried to help him with that and we did help him with that and then I said, you know, I want to talk to you about something more. Last year you just kind of brushed me off on this long-term care thing and the way you brushed me off, I maybe didn't use those exact words, was you got enough money to just pay for care when it happens and what I want to tell you is that that sounds good and it sounds easy but somebody that has in the multiples of millions of dollars and they're 85 years old and they need care or they're deceased and we really need the care for mom who's still alive and it's the son and daughter, it's just not that easy to access care, access this money, which account because you got a whole team of lawyers and accountants and insurance people and financial people like me who have set all this stuff up in trusts and this for that and, you know, to avoid estate taxes and then all of a sudden we have a need for money. That's just not that easy to set up and so I really put him in the situation of needing a claim or actually needing to make a claim of his own money and he was all, became all four of it when I started talking about this claims concierge thing and I said being able to access this when your family's in need will be huge for you and he just... Yeah, because it's, you know, he obviously could run multiple companies but he's putting his wife, you know, or his kids in this situation where, believe me, you know, there's 14 different kind of cares you never heard of and everything I've experienced with them is they all have very intricate things that make you eligible or not eligible. Well, these people that have a lot of money and they're in their 80s, you know, and I have a lot of them as clients and I try to talk to them when they're in their 60s and 70s where they're still healthy enough to do something about the problem and setting up these services, they don't realize that they're not going to be large and in charge when this is happening. They're going to need help and most of them are not very good at asking for help and, you know, like I might be here but when you're in your mid-80s, I'm going to be in my mid-80s and maybe Tom will help you out a little bit but it really would be nice to have these people and you actually, if you can get with the nationwide where you don't even have to buy a hybrid long-term care, you could just buy a regular annuity that has no health underwriting and you can access this, you know, claims concierge or health advocate concierge person through nationwide and they'll actually pay for it. So this is something worth looking into and what I really want to say is if you're on the fence about this stuff, you know, if you've kind of dismissed long-term care, you listened a little bit and then you've been like this guy, you just kind of brushed us off and kind of said I'll pay for it if I have to have it, I'm never going to one of those places, here's what I'm going to tell you, do this for your family, do this for the caregivers or the future caregivers that are going to be around you, let's get some kind of a plan in place and, you know, you could buy and I mentioned this to this guy, buy half a policy, let's take half of what you otherwise would buy or what I'd recommend and then you'll have half the bill paid for, how does that sound to you? And he was just, well then we kind of got around and we went around, he didn't want half a policy, this guy didn't want half of anything and most of these people that have money, you know, and I'm going to include myself a bit in these, I'm going home healthcare, I mean I have a beautiful home and if there's any way possible, even if it's more expensive, I'm going to have people brought in to take care of me that allows me to stay right in my home and I've got a hybrid long-term care policy that's going to pay for, you know, probably a million dollars of that, you know, and that was by the way when Nelda was in the hospital, I just want to go home, well don't you want to go to it? No, I want to go home.

She, you know, she wanted to go home and who wouldn't, right? And that's where she's going to feel at home and it was amazing to me, she's only been there two days, I mean she's up and walking around and come a long way in a short period of time, if you're wondering, I thank you all for your prayers for Tammy and her mother but, you know, there is a lot to be said for being motivated, in fact the ambulance driver even said that, he said I can tell she's motivated now that she's home, where she wasn't motivated in the hospital to even get out of bed. So you looked at all the long-term care coverages that we offer and, you know, you and I for your own personal situation have just walked through this many, many times and you elected for this thing called short-term care and recovery care, which buys you one year of home health care at a pretty high level, 1200 bucks a week and it also buys you one year in a facility and those are separate benefits and that could be an assisted living. You can see this is a really an opportunity for you to finish well in my opinion and that's why we want to remind you that all this is brought to you by Cardinal Guide and so you can contact Hans because we know that no, you know, there isn't an easy solution for everybody's situation is a bit different and so, you know, he wants to custom make a thing for your situation and Tom's there to help as well.

Again, you go to cardinalguide.com. Again, if you want to find out more information on this show, you know, the long-term care concierge, it's right there on the long-term worries tab and again we're so grateful, we really are, that you listen to our show and it's our prayer really that you would finish well. Great show Hans.

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