Sunday, January 17, 2010

Financial Planning

Penteco is a company in DC that offers financial planning and insurance. I am not familiar with the company beyond reading the first page of its twitter stream.

I do believe this company is headed in the right direction.

One of our biggest problems in health care is that people are sold insurance without adequate financial planning. If you are sold insurance and can't pay the premium or can't pay the deductible, then you effectively have no health care.

I would love to see more people providing financial planning type services to the middle and lower middle classes.

This costs money.

One of the biggest sources of money for financial planning services is health insurance commissions.

The health care billn self-righteously sets limits on administrative expensive, which I assume includes commissions. This effectively dries up a source of revenue for financial planning. Drying up funds for financial planning perpetuates a system where people buy insurance but lack the financial planning to be able to depend on their insurance.

In the Medical Savings and Loan, I create a legion of people called Health Care Advocates whose job is to help people with long term health planning. Such a program could easily be merged with financial planning services. A service like this could provide tremendous value to people's lives. It would also employ thousands of people. Unfortuately, the service is made untenable with the new legal constraints on administrative services placed in the health care reform.

I understand the impulse to want to regulate the profits of evil insurance companies. The problems with regulations that set administration expenses is that it weeds out those expenses that benefit policy holders along with the evil profits.

No comments: