Some people who read The Need for a New Business Model asked me to explain how an Independent Living Services Plan (ILSP) might work. Please review the following and give me feedback.
Independent Living Services Plan
How It Might Work
An insurance firm offers an Independent Living Services Plan for a reasonable monthly premium. If and when a customer needs long-term medical expenses including personal assistant services, durable medical equipment, long term therapies, and maintenance drugs, the insurance firm assigns a case worker. The case worker and the customer and other relevant people will determine what long-term medical expenses are needed and for how long. This road-map will identify government and non-government agencies that will pay for each expense. The road-map will also lay out the processes and procedures required to obtain and maintain funding for these expenses. The road-map will be periodically reviewed and updated. Any expense that cannot be covered by a 3rd party will be covered by the Independent Living Services Plan and the customer based on a sharing formula identified in the Plan.
Research needs to be done to determine the costs and benefits of offering this kind of insurance. What systems can and should be built to enable people to build and maintain an Independent Living Services road-map? What training would an ILSP caseworker need? What business model for providing personal assistant services should be implemented? Should this kind of insurance be combined with the more traditional long term disability insurance that caps services provided? How can Remote Assistance Services and robots improve the business case? Can the business case be improved if/when insurance companies persuade Medicare/Medicaid to modernize their rules and regulations regarding long-term medical expenses reimbursements? What might be a reasonable monthly premium that will make this a viable idea? Can/should premiums and sharing formulas be based as a percentage of household incomes? These are the sort of questions financial institutions in conjunction with the disability community should be evaluating.
This is just one scenario. Other scenarios should be proposed and evaluated. How can we obtain risk management and accrual services to project the costs and benefits of these scenarios? What other research is needed to prove the viability of any new strategies? Please share this with people who may be interested. Please let me know if you have any questions.
