Assured Allies partners with EquiTrust on long-term care insurance

Boston-based insurtech startup Assured Allies has partnered with Des Moines-based EquiTrust Life Insurance Company to offer long-term care (LTC) insurance accompanied by a wellness program with rewards for healthy behaviors.

EquiTrust’s Bridge LTC coverage includes the NeverStop wellness program, based in part on Assured Allies’ Age Assured LTC coverage and wellness program, launched in 2020.

Larry Nisenson, chief growth officer, Assured Allies

“NeverStop is a science backed wellness program that creates a positive, proactive way for people to help their aging,” says Larry Nisenson, chief growth officer at Assured Allies. “We want to help people recognize that they can participate in their own healthiness, participate in their own wellness, and we reward and incent them with dollars that get used for their long-term care needs down the road. It’s underpinned by a data and predictive modeling approach.”

Bridge underwrites LTC policyholders by starting with a 20-minute video interview including physical and cognitive tests. Assured Allies makes the LTC policy guaranteed issue even while reducing the risk for the underwriter, according to Nisenson. Bridge operates as an annuity, with premiums starting at $50,000. Bridge LTC policies “aim to help consumers prepare for retirement and protect themselves from unmet long-term care costs,” he says.

“Every person that applies for this product is able to purchase it. There is nobody that is denied,” Nisenson added. “Somebody who’s unhealthy generally can’t purchase long-term care insurance. Even the most unhealthy could purchase the Bridge annuity from EquiTrust and get long-term care coverage.”

The lower risk even with the lack of restrictions on the policies is possible because of new models Assured Allies developed. “The industry has been using the same actuarial tables for 40 years in spite of the fact that healthcare, medical improvements, longevity, and all of the risk modeling has changed,” Nisenson says. “Because we’re a science-based, data-based, predictive analytics company, we bring to the equation a multidisciplinary team of data scientists, software engineers and actuarial science clinicians and researchers. We created a brand new paradigm of underwriting, using machine learning to drill down to what matters and the questions we ask people.”

Assured Allies’ goal for Bridge and NeverStop is to raise awareness about the need for LTC insurance. “Very few people who need long-term care own a long-term care insurance policy. There’s somewhere north of 65 or 70 million people over the age of 65,” Nisenson says. “About 50% of them will have a long-term care event that requires some sort of long-term care funding, and only six and a half million people have a long-term care insurance policy.”

Bridge and NeverStop provide services so seniors can continue living at home, or “age at home,” as Assured Allies states. The forerunner to these offerings, Age Assured, is distributed through LTC insurance partners including Bankers Life, Senior Helpers, Genex and LTCG. NeverStop, in partnership with EquiTrust, will also be “chassis-agnostic” in its distribution, as Nisenson described it. “Working with these long-term care insurance companies, we got to understand the risk of their portfolios and understand which type of policyholders we could help the most to continue to stay and live independently as they age,” he says.

As an example of how NeverStop provides certain benefits based on the intake interview, Nisenson cited a statistic that in 8% of all dementia cases, there is a correlation to early onset hearing loss (before age 65). If a policyholder has that issue, the program works with them to get a hearing aid and checks in periodically to make sure they’re using it.

“It’s as simple as getting a hearing aid and using a hearing aid. But most people don’t do that. They don’t do it because hearing aids are cumbersome, they’re expensive and they don’t calibrate right. So instead, most people will suffer through and it creates social isolation. They start to pull back,” Nisenson says. “When we bring somebody into the NeverStop wellness program, we make them aware.”