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The John Hancock Building in Boston. Credit: John Hancock

Life Health > Long-Term Care Planning

John Hancock to Sell Life-Long-Term Care Product Through Worksites

By Allison Bell

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What You Need to Know

  • The new policy will provide LTC benefits through an optional death benefit payment acceleration feature.
  • John Hancock helped create the modern U.S. LTC benefits market.
  • A smaller insurer announced the launch of a life-LTC program in April.
  • One possible John Hancock marketing edge: Jack Nicklaus.

John Hancock is introducing a worksite life insurance product that includes optional long-term care benefits, and it has enlisted golf legend Jack Nicklaus in the effort to attract distributors’ attention.

The Boston-based unit of Manulife Financial announced Monday that it will be aiming a new Premier Benefit Indexed Universal Life product at the voluntary benefit market.

The product is an individual life insurance product, but it will be presented to consumers through their employers’ benefits programs.

What it means: Life and annuity issuers seem to be making more efforts to tiptoe back into the long-term care benefits market than in the 2010s.

The John Hancock announcement appears to support the possibility that the return to the LTC market is a real trend.

The issuer: John Hancock is one of the biggest life insurers in the United States, and it helped create the modern U.S. long-term care insurance market.

Like many other LCTI issuers, John Hancock ran into problems with the assumptions used to design and price the products, and a dramatic decrease in interest rates that slashed the earnings on the investment portfolio the company was hoping to use to supplement premium revenue.

John Hancock stopped writing new individual stand-alone LTCI policies in late 2016.

The long-term care revival: Federal Life Group, a smaller insurer, recently announced in April that it would be marketing a life-LTC hybrid at the worksite.

National Guardian Life continues to move ahead with efforts to introduce a relatively new individual LTCI product, and Mutual of Omaha, New York Life and Thrivent are examples of companies that have kept established LTCI businesses in operation.

Washington state created a public LTC benefits program that gave residents a onetime chance to opt out by buying commercial LTCI coverage.

Some LTCI issuers and distributors hope that other states will boost LTCI sales by creating public LTC programs that include onetime or ongoing incentives for residents to buy commercial LTCI coverage.

The John Hancock product: The new John Hancock product is an indexed universal life policy, meaning that, if the policy owner meets policy requirements, the benefits will have a minimum value.

Part or all of the total amount of benefits can be tied to the performance of the S&P 500 index. If the index does well, the total amount of benefits available can be higher than the minimum.

An employee who buys an IUL policy will own the policy, meaning that they can keep the coverage in place if they leave their employer.

John Hancock will underwrite the coverage, rather than offering the coverage on a guaranteed-issue basis, but it will speed up the underwriting process by using a fast digital underwriting system.

“In this age where you can get anything from groceries to a mortgage electronically, it’s important we offer that level of ease and convenience,” Neal Kerins, John Hancock’s vice president of product development, said in a comment on the underwriting strategy.

Employees can get the long-term care protection as an optional IUL policy benefit.

The option will accelerate the payment of the policy death benefit to the insured if the insured individual needs long-term care, according to John Hancock.

Employees can also choose to accept a free, built-in Vitality wellness incentive program or pay $2 per month extra to sign up for a more extensive Vitality Plus wellness incentive program.

Marketing support: John Hancock is supporting sales of its products by appealing to distribution executives’ love of golf.

John Hancock is sponsoring the NAILBA42 conference, which is set to start Oct. 31 in Hollywood, Florida, and will feature Jack Nicklaus on its main speaker stage. The main stage is sponsored by John Hancock.

The organization holding the event, the National Association of Independent Life Brokerage Agencies, was acquired by Finseca in 2022 and is now known as NAILBA, a Finseca Community. The organization represents many major distributors of life insurance and other insurance and annuity products.

Correction: An earlier version of this article described the nature of the new product incorrectly. The product is multi-life insurance with a long-term care rider.

The John Hancock Building in Boston. Credit: John Hancock

Allison Bell

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