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Disability Insurance Observer: Old reliable

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Maybe 2013 will be a year when both group and individual disability insurance get more attention.

This possibility came to me the other day as I was listening to a business owner acquaintance who has only a vague idea of what I write about, and isn’t too interested in hearing about the details.

He was telling me about all sorts of devious schemes he’d come up with to get the assets socked away in his employer’s defined benefit pension plan and shift them into a defined contribution plan.

That got me thinking.

Agents and brokers can, of course, get into long, drawn-out conversations about major medical insurance these days, but, really, why? What a mess.

If you’re trying to create a brochure or website for either the individual or group health insurance market, how do you write any content that won’t be out of date in three minutes?

Defined benefit pension plans are a blessing for the people who still have them, but the people who still have them have no idea what they are.

I don’t write much about life insurance or 401(k) plans these days, but it does seem as if both the Republican and Obama administration budget proposals make the idea of talking in-depth about the future of either life insurance or retirement plans … complicated.

Disability insurance, meanwhile, seems to be an island of regulatory simplicity and relative stability.

Changes in tax laws could affect the status of disability insurance benefits, but, maybe not, and, really, very few people buy disability benefits with much awareness about the tax implications, anyway.

People buy income protection because they know someone else who needed it, or someone metaphorically hit them over their heads with the right shoes and got it through their skulls that something could physically get into their skulls.

Maybe this is a good time to talk about a product that likely will be about the same in a year as it is today.

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