On today’s episode of A Drink With The Hurricane, Steve discusses Why You Need To Accept Long-Term Care Insurance.

If you look at the Home Care Pulse Report, I am going to be talking about the graphic 3.21.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

You will see a graphic where they talk about all the different payer sources that people say are their payer sources. And the number one payer source is private funding, money out of pocket, that’s like 70, 80% of the total revenue that the industry gathers. Which makes sense, it’s a private pay industry. The number two payer source though is long term care insurance (LTC).

 

Now, long term care insurance like Prudential, Genworth Financial, MetLife, CNA, Cigna, and Mutual of Omaha, it just goes on and on. There are so many long term care policies out there. Right now, 11 to 12% of all the revenue generated for the industry comes from long term care insurance. And that number is way too low. Way too low. Like it needs to be much higher. Back in the day, when I had my home care company and we were doing five million dollars a year in total annual revenue, 28 to 30% of our revenue came from long term care insurance, that’s almost a third of all the revenue we generated. So five million dollars, a third, that’s like one point million dollars a year that came from long term care insurance.

 

I highly recommend to all of my clients, but I recommend to everybody who’s out there to accept long term care insurance. Now the reason why so many people aren’t getting funding from long term care insurance is real simple. We don’t accept the assignment of benefits. What is the assignment of benefits? The AOB, right? Assignment of benefits. What this means is that if I have a patient who comes to me who has long term care insurance, I will bill the long term care insurance company directly. When I bill the long term care insurance company directly, they send me invoices because I have that assignment of benefits, my client gets the care that they need to stay home and they never have to pay a dollar out of pocket.

 

Now a lot of people out there are gun shy about doing this. Most of you reading this, your policy is, the patient pays you directly, and then they submit invoices and they get reimbursed. That is a big mistake! Whoo! Okay? The reason why, you like that effect? The reason why I say that’s a big mistake is that people who have paid for these policies have paid tens of thousands of dollars for these policies over 20, 30, 40 years time. They don’t wanna pay anymore. And if you are the only agency in your area that will accept the assignment of benefits, they will go with you before anybody else because you will bill the insurance company and they get the care.

 

I had social workers at hospitals, social workers at rehab centers, directors of nursing at assisted living communities and more who all referred me, initially, like when I first came in, because they’re always working with somebody else. When you go to get referrals, they’re already working with somebody that does what we do, right? But when I came in and said, “I accept the AOB, and I’ll bill directly.” They said, “We’re gonna give you every patient we have “that has long term care insurance.” Which is like one in four.

 

So, I was like, “Okay, that’s a great starting point!” And then what ended up happening was I did so good by those patients, they started referring me other patients that didn’t have long term care insurance and were paying me directly. So, it’s a great way to use to get into an account, to get the referrals coming in. Now I understand why you don’t. Because you have to float that cash, and so when it comes to payroll a lot of people don’t have the resources to be able to float two or three months of payroll before getting reimbursed.

 

So, what I always recommend people do is that you submit your invoices weekly, not monthly. When you submit your invoices weekly to the long term care insurance companies, every week you have a check coming in. Yes, it’s a smaller amount, but you don’t have to wait until you’ve accumulated a month’s worth of bills, then send it out and then wait two months to get paid. Instead, as soon as a bill is accumulated, you send out the invoice for it, and then you start receiving payment 30 to 45 days later. So this way you’re not out more than 60 days and most of us can float 60 days.

 

So, there’s your tip, that’s what we’re discussing this week. Assignment of benefits, get on that bandwagon. Next year, I want to see the Home Care Pulse Report say that 20% of the revenue that the industry collects comes from long term care insurance. The insurance companies are making money hand over fist. All right? They should pay for this stuff. They do, accept the assignment of benefits, get the patients, take care of them, get the money. It’s like a win, win, win, win, win. Make it happen and there’s the tip.

 

You want more information about this, how to do this, what does an assignment of benefits form look like, et cetera. We have a course called the Home Care Special Ops, and it’s all part of Hurricane University.

 

To learn more check out our FREE course Initiate: Master Your Home Care Business