Incubating Long-Term Care Sales:

The California Partnership Offers LTC Planning Tools

The California Partnership for Long-Term Care (Partnership) has created a tool to help Partnership-certified agents educate consumers about long-term care. The Partnership is a program of the California Department of Health Services.

The interactive CD titled "Securing the Future: Planning for Long-Term Care," is a customizable tool for presentations and one-on-one meetings. Brokers can tailor presentations to clients' needs; print pages; compare company policy rates; and download PDFs of all Partnership brochures. The main features of the CD are the calculators; cost of care by county; self-insuring calculator; and the policy premium estimator. In 2006, it received a Gold Award for Excellence in Public Health Information from the National Public Health Information Coalition.

The interactive CD, which is easy to navigate, divides information into four drop-down menus:

1. The "What You Know" section features a true or false quiz for users to test themselves or their clients on long-term care facts.

2. The "What You Need to Know" section includes facts on long-term care, care giving, health insurance, and Medi-Cal/Medicare.

3. The "Planning" section covers a variety of topics from talking with loved ones to financing the potential need for long-term care.

4. The "Next Steps" section provides contact information for organizations that can help with further planning.

The interactive CD is being converted into a Web-based tool to be released in late May. Agents who have purchased the CD will be upgraded automatically to the Web version for a discounted subscription. Agents, who want the Web upgrade discount, must purchase the CD before May 15th.

Agents Give Rave Reviews

Long-term care specialist, Don Rhodes said, "I had been driving around forever with a binder filled with plastic sheets of facts and figures, but this CD offers me more credibility as a niche professional who can help my clients. The biggest thing for me is to keep things very, very simple and be able to pull specific information that I think is important to a certain person. With this tool, I have the flexibility to do just that depending on the person's background and understanding of long-term care."

Independent broker Patrick Keith said, "The CD introduces the realities of long-term care in a straightforward way. My clients begin talking about the issues when they see the introduction with the Department of Health Services' logo and then the Partnership's logo. This tool gets people talking about the reality of long-term care and helps them understand the importance of planning."

Independent broker Joanne Givin said, "When I first tried this CD, I wondered what I had gotten myself into, but now I really love it. It has made me look a lot better to clients. With the amount of information on the CD, it is worth running it over and over because I keep finding new things. It is an incredible tool."

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To enhance your sales with this interactive CD, call the California Partnership for Long-Term Care at 916-552-8990, fax 916-552-8989, email: cpltc@dhs.ca.gov, or visit www.dhs.ca.gov/cpltc.