My Comments: When you reach retirement age, the elephant in the room becomes Long Term Care. This is when someone in the household becomes unable to perform two of what are called Actitivies of Daily Living, or ADLs. A healthy spouse will simply take on more and more to help the affected person manage and …
Continue reading Options for Funding Long-Term Care Expenses
My Comments: I started my career in financial services 40 years ago selling health insurance policies. I’ve long since lost track of the number of individuals, families and businesses I’ve worked with to give them proper coverage. My alarming memory over the years, until recently, was the dramatic rise in premiums from year to year. …
My Thoughts About This: For several years I followed the writings of Thomas P. M. Barnett. About 3 years ago, he suddenly closed his blog. He posted thousands of ideas and articles about global economics and security issues, most of which made sense. I never forgot one of them where he predicted that by 2045, …
My Comments: 40 years ago I cut my teeth as a financial advisor, selling health insurance policies to local families. Many of them were employed at the University of Florida and all paid exactly the same premiums. Older folks were effectively subsidized by younger folks, which meant that if what I sold was age sensitive, …
My Comments: There was little talk among the 17 candidates yesterday about trying once again to repeal Obamacare. Why is that? Once again, projected health care cost outcomes are moving in the right direction, downward. Yes, overall spending will increase, but by far less than happened before the PPACA. Just suppose, if over the past …
Continue reading Health Care Spending to Increase Moderately
My Comments: During my 40 years as an insurance agent, I sold my share of health insurance policies. Over these years, it became normal to see annual premium increases of 6% to 8% every year. These increases were driven primarily by Big Pharma (the drug industry) and by hospitals. For them it was the cost …
My Comments: A fundamental shift being triggered by the PPACA (Obamacare) is the level of income earned by medical specialists and medical generalists. In order to make it more attractive for a medical student to focus on primary care, the idea was to compensate specialists less and instead redirect those funds toward those focused on …
My Comments: Many of us remember a simpler time, not just in politics but in medicine. As we grow older, we tend to interact more and more with the world of health care providers, who have a language all their own. The following comes from the June 2015 internet magazine published by MDPreferred. Doctors and …
My Comments: After 6 years and counting, I’m still waiting for a valid, alternate idea to come from the political right. As an insurance agent for 40 years, and having sold individual and group policies for many of them, I understand many of the dynamics involved. Why is it not in our best interest as …
My Comments: As always, this is a difficult conversation for many of us. But that won’t make the issue go away. That only happens when you ultimately leave the building. I encourage everyone to take a few minutes to watch two short videos. The first one is accessed by clicking on the image above. It …
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