Insurance agents are optimistic they will sell more long-term-care policies in 2019 than they did in 2018, according to a national survey conducted by the American Association for Long-Term Care Insurance, headquartered in Westlake Village, Calif.
The association asked more than 1,000 members nationwide to participate in a first-ever survey about their business, and 333 responded. A majority of respondents (80.4 percent) said they had been selling long-term-care insurance for 10 years or more, and all respondents said they had prior experience selling both traditional and linked-benefit long-term-care insurance policies.
The vast majority (79.2 percent) said they expected new policy sales in 2019 to be higher or at least equal to sales in 2018. Only 20.8 percent of respondents said they expected lower sales this year. An even greater majority (92.8 percent) of respondents said they expected sales of linked-benefit LTC policies to be equal to or higher than the previous year’s sales.
The survey asked agents for their outlook on sales five years into the future. Nearly half of respondents (43.1 percent) were optimistic; they said they expected sales of both traditional long-term-care and linked-benefit LTC policies to be higher than 2019 sales. However, nearly as many respondents (42.8 percent) said they believed that sales of only traditional would be lower.
Just 6.6 percent thought that sales of both traditional and linked-benefit LTC policies would be lower, while 7.5 percent believed that traditional LTC insurance products would no longer be available, and that all sales would be linked-benefit long-term-care offerings.
The association was founded in 1998 to educate individuals and to support insurance and financial professionals. Its website is http://www.aaltci.org/.