Families
Insurance 360
Whether you are evaluating existing coverage or seeking new insurance, Monarch Financial uses a unique five-step process called Life Assurance 360™ to make certain that your policy fits your current needs and continues to serve its intended purpose for the duration of the policy.
By taking a comprehensive, 360° approach to designing, implementing and managing life insurance, we believe that the outcome produced for our clients is better than when each of these steps is addressed in isolation…that the whole is indeed greater than the sum of its parts.
In this step, we use our proprietary Life Assurance Design Questionnaire to educate you about your life insurance options while gathering information about your goals, preferences, and risk tolerance. Additionally, our one-page Pre-Underwriting Questionnaire helps paint a high-level picture of how your medical history may factor into the overall plan design.
Prior to submitting an application, our experienced underwriting team gathers and reviews your medical information and begins clarifying all missing or incomplete details with your physicians to present your case to the carrier(s) in the most favorable light possible. For larger, more complex cases where privacy and confidentiality are paramount, our staff underwriters and licensed physician conduct a private medical evaluation to fully assess your medical risk while protecting your identity from the Medical Information Base (MIB).
After the initial fact finding process and underwriting assessment are complete, our underwriting and marketing teams develop product recommendations based on your goals, risk tolerance, and preferences regarding the five areas of product design: safety, flexibility, equity, certainty, and premium.
After product recommendations are developed, we create meaningful analyses of each plan and present the recommendations in a cogent format that empowers you to make informed decisions.
After you make your choice from among the recommended plans, we initiate an on-going process that monitors and measures the performance of your plan to ensure that your benefits remain on track for the life of the policy. We regularly review the plan’s performance with you using a concise, yet thorough, policy review document.
Disability Insurance
Disability insurance pays benefits when the insured is unable to earn a living due to sickness or injury. Like all insurances, disability income insurance is designed to protect against financial disaster.
Most disability policies pay a benefit that replaces some part of the insureds earned income when they are unable to work. The chances of being disabled for longer than three months are far greater than the chances of premature death.
Life expectancy is greater today, because medicine has made many illnesses and injuries less life threatening. This is good news, but it does increase the need to protect your income with disability insurance.
Long-Term Care Insurance
Long-term care insurance (LTCI) is a contractual arrangement that pays a selected dollar amount per day for a selected period of time for skilled, intermediate or custodial care in nursing homes and/or home health care.
Because Medicare and other forms of health insurance do not pay for custodial care, many residents of nursing homes have only three alternatives for paying their nursing home bills: their own assets, Medicaid and long-term care insurance.
Long-term care refers to a range of medical and personal services that provide ongoing care for people with chronic disabilities who have lost the ability to live independently.
The risk of contracting a debilitating illness (and the resulting medical bill) is usually one type of risk best assigned to an insurance company through the purchase of a long-term care insurance policy, a life insurance policy with a long-term care rider, or a hybrid life and long-term care insurance policy.
Navigating Policy Pricing
What many people don’t realize is that the single greatest impact on the price of a life insurance policy is professional management of the medical underwriting process. Using our knowledge of how carrier underwriters, medical directors, and actuaries make decisions, we proactively position your life insurance application it its most favorable light.
We accomplish this through a proprietary informal underwriting process where we complete 90% of the underwriting BEFORE an application is submitted to an insurance company. This preliminary process enables us to pre-qualify underwriting offers from insurance companies, while protecting your Personal Health Information from the Medical Information Bureau so that your insurability remains unharmed.
As a result, we are able to deliver the best possible underwriting offers to our clients. Once received, the top offers from various companies are analyzed by our team. We match the best underwriting results to the appropriate product and optimized solution. We then discuss all of this information with you so that you can make an informed decision.
Before submitting an application, we collect all of the evidence required to render an underwriting decision so we can ensure your information is accurate. Any gaps can be clarified with your physicians before any evidence is submitted to the insurers. Also, contextual information can be added to help insurance company underwriters understand the big picture – why you are seeking insurance coverage, what you are doing to address any health issues, etc.
Most surprises in an underwriting evaluation come from the medical exam and lab work in connection with the life insurance application. Our confidential, private evaluation allows our team to review your exam and laboratory results prior to them being submitted to a carrier. These results, combined with a HIPAA-compliant confidential review of your medical records, allows us to assess your life insurance risk, address any abnormalities which may be present in the exam or lab results, and determine which carriers will have the most favorable evaluation of the application. By proactively providing the home office underwriter with a clarified and coordinated presentation of your medical information, we remove as many surprises as possible and can usually help positively affect the evaluation of your risk.
Next, we submit your case to multiple insurance carriers using a carefully-structured methodology. This is where Underwriting Advocacy can be especially impactful in addressing the complexities of coordinating large amounts of coverage with multiple carriers. Each carrier has a limited amount of risk it is willing to accept on a particular life. One large case submitted inappropriately to too many carriers at once, can flood the market. This can essentially block you from gaining access to higher amounts of coverage.
MEDICAL EXAMS: Although several companies may be selected at the beginning of the underwriting process, the Underwriting Advocacy process enables you to use one medical exam for all companies, avoiding the inconvenience of unnecessary or duplicate tests. The medical information can be shared with all companies in a format designed to present your case in its most favorable light.
UNDERWRITING INTERVIEWS: During the home office underwriting evaluation process, we conduct phone conferences, as needed, between your physicians and carrier underwriters so that the proper information and positioning is provided to obtain the most favorable offers possible.
After underwriting offers have been received, we consult with you and your advisors to select the best products and offers from the most appropriate insurance company or companies.
Key to the success of this proactive approach is implementation by an experienced underwriting team made available through our relationship with the ValMark Companies. Our consulting team includes several former insurance company Underwriting Vice Presidents and Medical Directors, a licensed physician, and a senior staff of case management, business processing and policy service specialists. Together, they confidentially represent, clarify and coordinate the details of your application with multiple insurance companies throughout the underwriting process.
View Our Case Studies
A NON-TOBACCO CIGARETTE USER?
SITUATION: A 59-year-old male was applying for $10 million of coverage and admitted to “social” cigarette use. At face value, this automatically results in Smoker rates across the board – you smoke cigarettes, you’re a smoker. We knew, however, that one carrier could potentially offer some forgiveness provided we met a number of different caveats.
APPROACH: We worked to quantify his use, scoured his medical records for any contradictory statements (in regards to tobacco), and proved that his use was, indeed, “social” via a negative nicotine screen. Although we were