John Hancock Long Term Care Insurance Is Considered the Cream of the Crop

When it comes to LTC insurance providers, John Hancock Long Term Care Insurance has long been considered to be among the cream of the crop. They were one of the first companies to begin selling this ever-more-important insurance product and theirs are still considered to be among the best policies of this type that can be owned. John Hancock has always been renowned for its claims-paying capability, too.

Very recently as of the time of this writing, John Hancock qualified to become listed in the Insurance Marketplace Standards Association (IMSA), which is the premier independent standards-setting and compliance solutions organization for the life insurance, annuity, and long-term care insurance marketplace. John Hancock has to undergo rigorous review every three years to re-qualify for membership listing, so this is quite an achievement. Companies achieve membership based on their having high ethical standards (such as being very truthful in their marketing and advertising) as well as delivering high product and service quality.

Jim Gallagher, global compliance chief for John Hancock, says, "John Hancock is proud to attain national ethics recognition from IMSA. Our vision is to be the most professional life insurance company in the world, providing the very best financial protection and investment management services tailored to customers in every market where we do business. We commend IMSA for their hard work in promoting industry standards."

However, John Hancock did recently need to raise its premiums on over 275,000 of its LTC policy holders.

When the long-term care insurance market opened up in the early 1990s, John Hancock sold many policies based on the idea that the policy holders would only keep them for a limited time and then drop them--such as if they had bought a term life insurance product to insure them against the unexpected for a temporary period of time. Some financial professionals recommend that anyone who has a net worth of at least $2 million does not need to maintain a long-term care insurance policy, the premiums on which are high compared to other insurance products (except for health insurance, which many will tell you is not "real" insurance anyway but is actually subsidized medicine) because of the fact that people under 40 cannot qualify for these products (that is, they are by their nature relatively high-risk insurance policies). So, many John Hancock LTC policies were sold with the idea that as their holders continued to work and gather assets, if nothing unexpected or unforeseen happened they would one day be worth at least $2 million and no longer need their policies--meaning, John Hancock would never have to pay any claims on them.

Instead, the vast majority of these clients have chosen to continue with their policies because they don't desire to have to pay out a great deal of money from their own personal fortunes just because they would have the capability of doing so in the even that they needed long-term care. Furthermore, these policy holders decided that they weren't satisfied with paying in all of those premium dollars and then getting nothing in return in the long run. (The analogy with term life insurance isn't strong here because term life is far, far less expensive than LTC.)

On average, these affected policy holders now have to pay an additional $262 per year--or $21 per month--to maintain their LTC policies.

While John Hancock was certainly not trying to deceive anyone, this recent development demonstrates that long-term care insurance is much more valuable to people than those without it and many financial professionals believe it is. A strong provider like John Hancock is a great place to turn to when you are considering buying LTC.

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