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.
