Short-term, long-term, voluntary or group, disability income serves a critical need
Disability income insurance-while influenced by the same trends that drive growth in supplemental health products such as critical illness, accident, hospitalization and gap insurance-has a marketing history that is more complex than that of these other products.
Some brokers of disability income, for example, have centered their practice on serving high-income professionals such as doctors, dentists or athletes, or using disability to fund buy-sells in small corporations. But disability's appeal extends far beyond these elitist occupations.
"Those who live paycheck to paycheck are extremely vulnerable to disability," says Casey Shirley, national sales manager at American Public Life, which sells short-term disability income protection on a voluntary basis. "They can be well served by an affordable short-term disability plan.
Agents, brokers and consultants offering benefits education and communication will be affected.
Health benefits take political center stage as executive and legislative candidates argue about the success or failure of Obamacare, but retirement issues are also critical to a wide range of employers.
In the next two years, a series of new regulations will change the way employers and their advisers will administer and communicate retirement benefits. Many of the new regulations will help protect retirement benefits from mishandling and improper reporting, but plan administrators are likely to see them as headaches.
