The following is a guest post.

Under various new healthcare reforms, obtaining health insurance for a terminally ill patient is indeed possible, but will require a bit of shopping around within the insurance market.

It hasn’t gotten easier, as there was a time recently when a terminally ill patient would have the insurance doors close on them left and right. Now, while not all doors are open, there are a few as many states are now requiring insurance companies to drop all discrimination against pre-existing conditions.

WHAT TO EXPECT FROM INSURERS
·    Even insurers who reside within a state that forbids discrimination will still ask for medical documentation for the purposes of the quote they offer;
·    For a terminally ill patient, you should still expect a high-cost quote;
·    More than likely the amount of coverage will also be restricted;
·    Your deductible will likely be large, especially if treatments for this patient are still ongoing;
·    Any death benefits will likely undergo a waiting period, to ensure premiums have had a substantial period to be paid, typically 1 to 2 years.

ALTERNATIVE OPTIONS TO INDIVIDUAL INSURERS

State-sponsored coverage options are also available for the terminally ill and should certainly be researched and considered. Medicare and Medicaid can help shoulder some of the burden piled up from medical procedures, prescriptions, etc. but unfortunately, this coverage will not be anywhere near as much as what an individual insurance company could provide.

Also, there’s the option of going with a private insurer; in these cases the patient will receive “accelerated life benefits”, which are proceeds paid out in advance at a significantly higher rate than the client of any other insurer.
Unfortunately, the downfall of private insurance is that it is significantly more expensive, but would provide enough coverage. If combined with a government program, you might be able to offset some of the costs and not put the full brunt of your coverage needs in the court of the private insurer to save some cash.

There are obviously a lot of questions that you need to ask when considering health insurance, so it’s important that you deal with a reputable company like HBF. An established company will be able to give you options to suit your situation. You will be able to speak with a professional representative & get any questions answered, to give you peace of mind.

The following is a guest post.

Unfortunately, many an unsuspecting insurance policy buyer takes the time to thoroughly vet their insurance company, but still ends up getting swindled by the infamous, and unethical, crooked insurance agent.

These crooks have all kinds of tricks up their sleeve that cheat you out of your hard-earned money right when you or your loved ones, need it the most. Safeguard your interests by taking necessary precautions to ensure that you are not a victim of one of these four popular insurance agent scams

1.       The Old Policy Switch Trick

You’ve carefully plotted out the exact coverage that you need and have outlined it into the perfect term life insurance policy with your agent. However, when you go to sign on the dotted line, your agent hasn’t drawn up a policy for a term policy, but has actually switched it for a whole policy—which is permanent, contains built-in fees, has higher premiums, and is very expensive to cancel.

 Why would the agent do this? To make a substantially larger commission off your policy.

Unfortunately, by the time you realize that the switch has happened, you’ve already signed the contract and are now fully responsible for the surrender fees of the policy.

2.       The Old Twisting Swindle

A common swindle amongst crooked insurance agents is called “Twisting” and occurs when they inflate your worth with the promise of annuities that will provide bigger payouts down the road.

Generally, these annuities are purchased in advance—by way of premium lump sums, or payments over a length of time—so that an individual can later retire and solely live off of the income that the annuity provides. Due to the premium nature of these annuities, insurance agents bank roll big time on their commission if they manage to talk you into a very large one.

In order to substantiate your purchase of a bigger annuity, these agents will “twist” your worth and when it comes time for you to start collecting, you find out that the payments you’ve been making for years were never sufficient enough to receive the payout. At which point, you have to pay another large lump sum of money just to make up for the loss, completely negating the annuity all together as you now basically have to start over.

3.       The Old Churning Scheme

Most commonly, this is a scheme that crooked life insurance agents will—sadly—reserve for their elderly clients, who are long-term annuity holders.

How it works is the agent will advise the holder to replace the annuity currently in their holding for a brand new one that will provide more immediate cash value. Unfortunately, these holders are not made aware that while they may receive a small payout now, the annuity will not fully mature to the status of their previous annuity holding for 10 to 15 years.

hile these holders are learning that their planned retirement has now been delayed for well over a decade—unless they pay a very substantial fee for early withdrawal—the agent has already made their commission and washed their hands of the holder.

One can be quite safe in assuming these schemes are a thing of them past. However, the best way to achieve peace of mind is to always deal with a trusted provider. Getting your life insurance quotes from Suncorp.com.au is a great way to ensure you’re dealing with an industry leader. For further enquiries, find out more at suncorp’s website today & sleep easy!

This is my first guest post at My Canuck Buck! I’m very excited to have this post, as it’s a topic I don’t know a lot about. Many thanks for Glenn Cooke (see his bio at the end) for providing it.

With all of the marketing hype surrounding different types of life insurance it’s easy for consumers to get distracted and confused. Advocates of one type of insurance assure us that there’s only one way to go, while others try to steer our attention to various aspects of the insurance policies.

In reality different types of life insurance are almost identical. Say you have two people with different structured policies that each payout $500,000. If both people die, both families receive payouts of $500,000. Can you tell the difference between the two policies? You can’t. The payouts are same; any other differences are irrelevant.

Toss away the glossy brochures and the competing opinions and you’re left with a fairly simple insurance product—a product that’s not that much different than car insurance or house insurance. In fact, there are only two attributes specific to life insurance that you should care about: the death benefit and the premium.

Unfortunately, the older we get, the more expensive life insurance gets. This is different than car insurance or house insurance, where our premiums may remain level throughout the years.

Life insurance companies could charge the year-by-year cost of life insurance and give us policies where the premiums go up every year. Consumers, however, won’t buy these types of policies. The insurance industry’s response is to take these annual cost increases and level them out over various periods of time. This is the key difference amongst the different types of life insurance—how long the insurance company has levelled the premiums out for.

Let’s say your life insurance costs over the next five years would be: year one, $300; year two, $350; year three, $400; year four, $450; and year five, $500. You could simply pay those annually increasing costs. If you did so, this type of insurance would be called one-year term.

Alternatively, we could take the average cost over those five years ($400/year) and simply pay that premium level each year for five years. This type of life insurance would be called 5 year term life insurance. Term life insurance basically averages out our increasing costs over a specific period of time: five years, 10 years, 20 years, and even as long as 30 years.

Now what happens if we average those costs out over an even longer period of time? Let’s say over our entire life? Doing so would level the life insurance costs for life. This kind of life insurance is called permanent life insurance.

With permanent life insurance policies, you are paying more than the cost of the policy in the early years, and less than the actual annual cost in the later years.

Due to the long-term nature of these policies, the insurance companies save or ‘reserve’ those extra premiums paid in the early years inside the policy. This money helps pay the expenses in the later years of the policy. Should you cancel this type of policy at some point in the future, the insurance company will refund you back some of that reserve. This refund is called a cash surrender value or cash value, and this type of life insurance (level premiums for life and a cash value if you cancel) is called whole life insurance. Note that these cash values are the frequent subject of marketing techniques by the life insurance industry.

In response to objections and concerns over the marketing tactics surrounding those cash values of whole life policies, the industry produced a second type of permanent life insurance policy called Term to 100. Term to 100 is basically a whole life policy, with no cash values. Put simply, it means you get level premiums for life, but you don’t get a refund if cancelled. As a result, the premiums for Term to 100 are generally lower than whole life insurance.

The third and final type of permanent life insurance is Universal Life. While this product comes with a lot of options, you can think of it as a bank account with a Term to 100 insurance withdrawal. Every month you deposit your Term to 100 insurance premiums into the ‘bank account.’ If you deposit exactly the same amount as your insurance premiums, your account balance stays at zero. If you deposit more than your insurance premiums, this money is invested according to the options you chose when you bought the policy. And if your investment balance grows large enough to cover your insurance costs then you may be able to skip paying premiums that month. These policies are often marketed using various non-guaranteed investment scenarios that focus on the investments rather than the insurance. And by non-guaranteed, I mean using really rosy assumptions that are likely to fail dramatically over the coming decades.

So that’s it, all the types of life insurance are the same except we pay the premiums differently across long periods of time. If you want cheap insurance today at the expense of higher premiums when you’re older, term insurance fits the bill. If you want insurance affordably in the long term, any of the three types of permanent insurance polices will allow us to lock in our premiums today for the rest of our life. The trade off with permanent policies is, of course, that their premiums today are higher than term insurance premiums.

Glenn Cooke is a life insurance broker and president of Life Insurance Canada.com.