Ep 460: Delay, Deny, Defend: Fixing The Broken Insurance System
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Consumers should be a little patient, a little assertive, very polite, because the people they're talking to are never the people in charge, to try to get that information up front and ask the questions in a general way like that. Is this all I'm going to have to pay? Is there anything else I should be looking at?

Hi everyone, I'm Jean Chatsky. Thank you so much for joining us today on Her Money. I want to start with three words that you have all likely heard by now multiple times. Deny, defend, depose.

Those were the words etched across the bullet casings in the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. They have been recited countless times as our country has grappled with the fallout of this violent act. Those words were inspired clearly.

by the work of Jay Fineman, author of the 2010 book entitled Delay, Deny, Defend, Why Insurance Companies Don't Pay Claims and What You Can Do About It. Jay is also a distinguished professor emeritus at Rutgers Law School. Thanks so much for being here with us today. I know you've been getting a ton of requests. I have. Glad to be here.

What was your first reaction when you heard those words being broadcast on pretty much every channel around the country? It was a very strange experience. I woke up that morning with sort of two dozen emails from media people in my inbox, and I couldn't figure out what was going on. Then I looked, and it was just of all the things one could have expected, that was at the bottom of the list, frankly.

Yeah, and you know it's been years since you wrote this book. You've been doing this work for years. You know maybe better than anyone else that people are really angry about their medical costs, maybe heartbroken in some cases. Did you ever suspect that those frustrations would culminate in something like this?

No, of course not. I get a lot of calls and emails from people who are frustrated, more than frustrated by their insurance companies, health insurance, homeowners insurance, auto insurance. And in many cases, they're up against huge bureaucracy, facing extensive costs and time, and they just don't know where to turn. So they would reach out to me. But the idea that it would lead to this kind of violence was unthinkable.

I know that there are probably 10,000 things that you can point to that are wrong with this system, a system that seems to consistently put shareholders' needs ahead of patients' needs, ahead of homeowners' needs. But can you spell things out for us in your own words? What do you think is really happening and how did we get here?

Well, I don't think it's a bad thing that insurance companies report to their shareholders. I think insurance companies should make a profit. It's the nature of the system we have, and it's a business like any other business, though more highly regulated and more important to lots of people. So I think we need a couple of things. One is we need to make the system of buying and selling insurance better.

People generally don't understand the details of what they're buying. They focus too much on price. And we need stronger regulation. Insurance is regulated by state departments of insurance. Health insurance is partly regulated by the federal government. There's litigation that involves the courts. And I think too often that has not been sensitive to the needs of ordinary consumers.

Can I just dig into what you said there and get a little specific? You said we need to make the process of buying and selling better and that people focus too much on price. Can you explain what you mean?

Sure. Once upon a time, the iconic slogans of insurance advertising were, "You're in good hands with Allstate," or, "Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there." That changed in the last few decades, driven by, "15 minutes can save you 15% or more on car insurance with GEICO." And the market became much more competitive and price became dominant. It's hard to understand insurance.

People don't want to think about bad things that are going to happen. And therefore, the insurance companies probably rationally decided we're going to try to sell on price and sometimes on service. But we're not going to tell people exactly what kind of coverage we're selling. And therefore, they're going to be surprised sometimes when they have claims.

In the health insurance realm, the system is much more complicated because it's not just the consumer and the insurance company. It's the insurance company, the healthcare provider, the pharmacy benefit managers, and everybody else in the process. But we see similar sorts of things. The Affordable Care Act made things better, but we still need to improve the way people buy insurance.

When we're talking specifically about health insurance, people tend often to focus on the upfront cost rather than the overall cost. How would you encourage people to actually look at that purchase?

Well, I think health insurance is a little different than most because lots of people incur some healthcare costs every year. You go to a doctor for an annual checkup, you may be ill once or twice. Your homeowner's insurance, if you're lucky, you'll never use it. You'll never get your money back. But

As a general matter, people ought to think about insurance as protecting them against really large financial expenses. Homeowner's insurance, you may have a minor loss because of a snowstorm. Health insurance, right, you need to pay your doctor when you go for your annual checkup. But what you really care about is the potential for catastrophic loss.

So we need to drive that home in significant ways. I said the Affordable Care Act has made inroads here. If you go to healthcare.gov or the state marketplaces, the federal government now mandates that

relatively clear descriptions and relatively clear calculations of price for common conditions. For example, Peg is having a baby. And if you compare plans A, B, and C, this is what it will cost. Or Joe has type 2 diabetes. Here's what it will cost. So you can make a more rational decision, but a decision based on the potential large consequences, not relatively small costs.

And yet we have this inordinate amount of frustration at the system, in part because it seems like when you do go to the doctor, and I went to the doctor this morning before I started talking to you. My husband is going to have some ankle surgery. We went for an opinion. And I'm

Pretty sure he's gonna get bills that he did not expect from this surgery I had a surgery a couple of years ago It took the insurance company two years to pay the doctor and faxes back and forth and back and forth and thankfully that doctor was really patient but the bills are a not easy enough to understand and

B, out of control, and then C, often denied by the insurance company so that you're not dealing with them once or even twice. You're dealing with the same charges over and over again. Why is this? And what does it have to do with how insurance companies actually make their money?

Well, it's that way in part because it's a very complex system with, in many cases, inadequate regulation. Hope everything works out great with your husband's ankle surgery. Thank you. What a number of people have encountered, however, is that the anesthesiologist, for example, will be in a different network.

And therefore, you get a surprise bill because that's charged at a higher rate, where you assume reasonably you go into the hospital or the outpatient center and you're buying a package. I'm buying all the care I need for this condition, and it's covered under my ordinary insurance.

Some states have started to crack down on this. I think we need more consumer-focused regulation like that. But unlike other insurance markets, the healthcare insurance market is incredibly complicated. So UnitedHealthcare...

where CEO Brian Thompson was murdered, is not just an insurance company. They're a drug provider, and they have other pieces of the ecosystem. And as you say, you're not dealing with a single payer, and you're not dealing just once. So that system needs to be streamlined.

And the only way it's going to be streamlined is if the government requires it to be. In the interim, and I'm thinking of another example that I think could not have been more confusing. My husband and I, and I'm just going to use us as an example because me search is a good thing. We both had colonoscopies. We both had colonoscopies with the same exact doctor.

I had my colonoscopy in one office. He had his colonoscopy in another office. His charge was thousands more than my charge because that office was some sort of a hospital surgical center and my office was not.

Did we know that going in? We had absolutely no idea going in. Was there anything that we could have done about it? Maybe knowing this in hindsight? Sure. But as a consumer, what am I supposed to do? What questions am I supposed to ask in order to be

Because I can't control the regulation that's coming out of the government, and chances are I'm not going to get a lot more of it in the next four years. What can I do to protect myself going in as a buyer of medical services? Yeah, it's very hard. And one thing I tell people over and over again, either up front or in the claims process, is often they think it's their fault. They've done something wrong.

the first thing you understand is it's not your fault. You haven't done anything wrong. This is the way the system is set up. So I encourage people to try to get information upfront. It's difficult because the person you're making the appointment with may not have all the knowledge. Your doctor is not going to want to deal with all the back office issues and so forth. But say, "Look,

I have gone to you, my doctor, because you're in network or because my medical plan says this will be covered to a certain amount with a certain deductible or copay. Is that true of all of the services I will receive here? Is there anything else I might have to pay for?

just like you would with any other product. I went to the dentist recently, needed a root canal repair. They give me what they call as a treatment plan, but what is effectively a statement of what it's going to cost. And it was true as to what they were going to bill and true as to what the specialist they were going to send me. If you go get your car repaired, they're going to say you need a transmission overhaul. It's going to cost you $2,500. And that's it. Consumers should be a little patient, a little assertive.

very polite, because the people they're talking to are never the people in charge, to try to get that information up front and ask the questions in a general way like that. Is this all I'm going to have to pay? Is there anything else I should be looking at? If I was working on a project with a home contractor, if I was renovating a bathroom, I would get estimates in writing.

Does it behoove me in any way to try to get a written sense of the upfront cost? Does that work at all? It can help. Obviously, it works better if you've had a fire in your house and you're talking to contractors. The difficulty is a lot of people are reluctant to shop among medical care providers. Is your husband really going to

visit three surgeons to get the same opinion, to find out what the costs would be. It's very difficult. For major procedures, I would think about that, not just because of the cost, but because often it's helpful just to get a second opinion. Extremely difficult for people to do that. They can if they think there's a lot of money on the line. I think it's probably more important to be in the no surprises position.

And then if it looks like, oh, wait, if I continue with this doctor, it's going to cost me a lot more than I expected. Then maybe you can go to someone else and ask. Ah.

I want to talk about the cost of medical care in general. And then I'd like to touch on homeowners insurance because with the fires and the hurricanes, it is becoming such a problematic issue for so many more people in this country. But before we do that, we're going to take a quick break. We are back. We're talking with Jay Feynman, expert in insurance law, torts, and condoms.

Contract Law. He is author of the 2010 book, Delay, Deny, Defend, Why Insurance Companies Don't Pay Claims and What You Can Do About It. We're recording with you the week of the TikTok ban.

when millions of Americans fled, albeit briefly, to the Chinese social media platform called RedNote. And a lot of interesting things happened there. But maybe one of the most interesting was that Chinese citizens and American citizens began comparing notes on health care costs. And in one viral video, the cost of two emergency room visits

was compared. In China, the cost was $80. And America, it topped $230,000 for virtually the same services. Why is medical care so much more expensive here? Yeah, that's a complicated question to which I do not know the answer, frankly. Part of it surely is because the system is very complex.

which increases not just patients' frustrations, but administrative costs. We know that drugs are sold at much higher prices in the U.S. than they are in a number of other countries for identical drugs. It was only under the last administration that Medicare, the largest purchaser of drugs in America, was able to do what other market actors are able to do, which is negotiate prices.

So that's a really complex question. And quite frankly, we've decided collectively that we're going to pretty much keep the system we have.

The first decision made in negotiations about the Affordable Care Act was we're not going to go to single payer. We're not going to go to Medicare for all. We're going to keep private companies. Political question. Politicians resolved it. So I think given that, we need to start working around the edges at least to reduce costs for people.

the drug negotiations were the start of that additional regulation would take it further. And I gotta say, following Brian Thompson's murder, I found myself thinking two things at the same time. Violence is never the answer and our system has to change. Do you think that this moment in our country has moved the needle at all?

Well, I was shocked but not surprised, if that makes sense, at the reaction online to the murder. The large number of people who celebrated it, who thought the murderer was a Robin Hood type vigilante, which is shocking, but it wasn't surprised. I think people who engage in this area need to think, how do they mobilize that?

People have short political attention spans. The media, no offense, sometimes has short attention spans. And that was the topic of the moment in early December. But now we seem to have moved on. I think it's possible to catalyze that response. It's what the murder showed. But it takes a lot of work on the ground by advocates to do that.

We are not at the time of year where people typically buy health insurance. That tends to happen during open enrollment, in the fall, tends to happen when you have an event that takes you out of one policy into another. Maybe you change jobs, maybe you get married. There are a number of events that precede this, but it is a choice that people make. Typically,

Typically yearly, I also know because I've done the research that it is a choice that people often don't pay any attention to at all. They just check the box and they take what they took last year. How can we do this better? How can we make sure that we are in the right policies for us? And in this landscape where we have a pretty obvious distinction between

PPOs and other network plans and HSAs where you pay more money upfront for a high deductible health plan. How can we know which is going to serve us better? It's hard because a lot of people don't like running numbers and a lot of people don't like particularly running numbers about bad things.

A number of the descriptions that one is provided when you do open enrollment at your employer or you're shopping otherwise, at least the front parts of them are pretty good. The details can get very complicated. As I've said, I think we need to make that process a little more transparent. But yeah, there's a tendency just to renew because you like your doctor. Well, your doctor may be in a lot of plans. So I would say one,

Project what your medical costs are likely to be, not in dollar amounts, but what kind of medical care are you likely to need in the next year? Pretty healthy? Maybe nothing. Maybe a broken bone. Chronic illness, completely different. And then focus on that in the literature that's available, the websites that are available online.

and try to come up with a sensible bottom line that makes you comfortable. This is not just an economic choice. It's an emotional choice. Some people like more coverage than they really need for financial reasons, and that's fine. So focus on the big picture and try to get the best information about the comparative plans with that big picture.

The big difference in my mind between health insurance and property casualty or even life insurance is that with health insurance, you want insurance that you know you're actually going to use. With property casualty insurance and life insurance, you're buying insurance and you hope you'll never use it in many cases. With the increase in natural disasters that has been tracking over the pandemic,

past couple of decades, we also need to get smarter, I think, about the coverage that we're buying for our homes. Where are we making mistakes? And what should we be doing differently?

Yeah. Again, we have to separate where the regulators are making mistakes from where individuals are making mistakes. So again, the information is not often widely available. For example, you care about three things when you're buying insurance. You care about price, care about coverage, and you care about quality, the quality of the company. Easy to get information in price.

We mostly don't have to worry about quality of the company in terms of their finances because they're well regulated in that respect. You can look at J.D. Power consumer report surveys, which are very reliable, where people report their claims practices. A lot of the big hole is in coverage because it's very hard to understand and insurance companies are not forthcoming. Very much like health care, I would say focus on the big picture.

What you care about is a loss that's going to have major financial consequences. So think a little bit, okay, what might happen particularly in my area? Am I in a wildfire prone area? Am I in an area in which there might be flooding? Okay, so then I know, oh, wow, wait, first of all, my homeowner's insurance is not going to protect me against flood. I need federal flood insurance for that. So I will look for that.

Oh, wildfire. What would happen if my house burned down? And this is true of all homeowners. Well, the expenses of rebuilding. I would be out of my house. What are the largest expenses of rebuilding? Gee, I know roofs are an especially expensive component of houses. Ask the agent or whoever you're dealing with particular questions like that. For example, we've seen a lot of companies across the country cut down on roof coverage.

They will now only pay you the depreciated value of your roof if you need to replace it. So you have a roof which costs $30,000, but you've had it for 10 years. They're only going to give you $10,000. The other $20,000 comes out of your pocket. So think about that. And the number one mistake people make is focusing on small losses.

People take deductibles which are too low. You don't want a $500 deductible on your homeowner's insurance because it's not a big loss and there might be adverse consequences if you file a $500 claim, like your premium might go up or they might cancel you the next year.

Homeowner's insurance covers special kinds of personal property, right? They will limit what they will pay for your computer and that sort of thing. You don't care if a company is going to pay $500 or $1,000 for your computer because you're not going to file that claim. And if you have a total loss, that's less than rounding error. So focus on the big picture.

and ask questions to the extent you get knowledgeable about where your big losses might occur. In my head,

head in my list of worries when it comes to homeowners insurance. A big one is that people just don't have enough. Home prices have soared in this country. And if you're carrying the same amount of coverage that you were carrying five years ago, you're underinsured because the cost of rebuilding that home has gone way up, no matter where you live, pretty much. Do

Do you feel like this is a risk for people? Totally. The statistics from the industry suggest that two-thirds of American houses are underinsured by 20% or more, which is significant, one, because you're going to be out of pocket a lot, and two, a number of policies have an 80% threshold, where if you don't insure for at least 80% of the value, you're going to get less if there is a claim.

The problem is most people ask their insurance company, "Okay, how much should I insure for?" Because what you care about is not the market value of your house. It's what it would cost to rebuild it. And consumer advocates who I respect say, "There are some websites where you could talk to a local contractor. If you have an ordinary house, how much per square foot would it cost to rebuild?" Yeah, you could do that. Most people just aren't going to do that, right?

So I would try to pin down the agent or whoever as much as possible. Is this going to be enough? Because they want to sell you more insurance, but they also want to keep the price low.

and those can be in tension. So that's a major gap in the system. I think the answer from the regulatory point of view is obvious. The insurance companies are going to provide the estimate and make it binding. Last question, and this is a general pricing question. In the past year, we've seen auto insurance premiums spike. We've seen homeowners insurance premiums spike. We've seen costs continue to go up on our health care premiums.

You've said a couple of times we focus too much on price. When we're shopping around, how do we not consider price? Well, you should consider price. But like anything else, if you're buying a television set, you can go into Best Buy and buy the cheapest television set they got. And maybe that's satisfactory. But for a lot of people, it's not going to be because the sound and the picture is just not going to be as good.

So think about why you're buying this and what you're willing to pay for it. And like I say, you can look at some sources. It was striking to me that Consumer Reports rates all kinds of household appliances. True story. My dishwasher caught fire a couple of years ago. No damage. We cut off the electricity and nothing happened except the dishwasher was ruined. I don't know anything about dishwashers.

So I went to Consumer Reports and they say, okay, so here's a list and this one is especially quiet, but this one takes too long. And we give this one a 93 and that one an 82. And I matched that against price and said, yeah, this is what I care about, dishwasher. It's tough to find that with insurance. Our research center at Rutgers Law School has tried to do that for some national policies. So you have to do that work yourself. Yeah, what you care about is not price, but value.

And everybody's value point is different. If you want to take the risk and buy cheap coverage from a less reliable company, be my guest. But don't complain at the end of the process then. Maybe it's worth, as with television sets, investing in quality. Jay Feinman, we will leave it there. Thank you so much for a really enlightening conversation. You're welcome. And we'll be right back.

And we are back for Mailbag, and Catherine Tuggle is behind the microphone for the first time in a very long time, and it is... Hello. Hello. So good to see you here. I'm always here. I'm always lurking. I'm always adding a semicolon to the newsletter or, you know, publishing something on the site. But yes, it is very nice to be on the podcast today as well. It is great to have you here. And one of my...

I don't know if it was a New Year's resolution, but it was something that I've been wanting to do is just make sure that our listeners know that

the different members of our team, you know, so having Emily behind the mic on occasion, having you pop in introducing folks to Sarah Pierce, who is another member of our editorial team, and just making sure that they get to know you as I know you. So they know you because you've, you know, been there and done that. But it's very, very nice to see you.

Yeah, well, it is. I mean, you know, when we talk about we sign emails from the Harmony team or we post something in the Facebook group from the Harmony team, I think people need to know who that is. And we are a small but mighty team. And when you email us or when you reach out, like you literally you get one of us. So it's a very intimate experience in the Harmony family.

With that, let's continue our conversation about insurance, this time a different type of insurance, with our first mailbag question. And I'll let you tee it off, but this is one we get all the time. Yeah, it really is. Long-term care insurance is such a hot-button topic. This question comes to us from an anonymous listener. She says...

Hi, Jean. I'm 56 and recently retired. My husband is about the same age and will retire in three years with a full pension, including health insurance. I've deferred my pension so it can continue to accrue, and I'll start to take it in three years. Once we both have pensions coming in, it will cover our monthly expenses. In the meantime, we are comfortably living off his salary. We have no mortgage or other debt. We also have a fully funded college fund set aside for our child who will be going to college full-time in the next year or two.

Between IRAs, Roth IRAs, 457 accounts, and inherited IRA, we have $2.5 million saved for retirement. This does not include the previously mentioned defined benefit pension.

My question relates to long-term care insurance. We recently met with a financial planner who has provided free through my previous government employer. We really liked him, but are confused about insurance. After I asked about long-term care insurance, he recommended whole life insurance with a long-term care rider. Is this a good idea? When we shopped around for life insurance 20 years ago, the advice at that time was to only buy term insurance and that whole life was a waste of money.

I'm struggling to shift my mindset and believe that whole life insurance is a good choice. Our advisor believes it's a good idea, not just for the ability to fund long-term care, but also because of the tax benefits. He tells us that many of his wealthy clients are the ones who are buying whole life insurance.

What do you think? Is this whole life insurance with a long-term care writer a good idea for funding future long-term care needs? What do we need to consider if we go this route? In addition, is it a wise tax move? I love the Her Money podcast. Thank you so much. Oh boy, boy, boy, boy, boy. Okay. First of all,

Congratulations on how you've set yourself up for retirement. I mean, you have done an amazing job. And the fact that college is fully funded as well is just a big relief to you. And I can guarantee your child the fact that that is paid for.

If you were given that advice about term insurance versus whole life insurance when you were originally shopping for life insurance 20 years ago, there's a good chance you got that advice from me. I mean, I...

often said that for the vast majority of people, the only way to get as much life insurance as you need to pay for things like college, the mortgage,

continuing support if one of the wage earners in your household or both of you, God forbid, were taken out of the picture. Whole life insurance is much more expensive than term life insurance. And so term life insurance is generally the recommendation, at least the recommendation to start. There are some cases where whole makes sense later down the road. But

The use of whole life insurance here is for a different reason. When people explore long-term care insurance, which they should do right about your age, you are looking at this at exactly the right time. That's interesting. I didn't know that. I would have actually said earlier that you needed to start earlier, so...

That's intriguing. Yeah, you know, 50s-ish, you can start around 50. You could start into your 60s. The problem with starting too early is that you end up paying the premiums for so many years and that gets expensive. The problem with waiting until later is that by the time people hit their 60s, they start to have health issues that...

take them out of the market for insurance because it inhibits their ability to qualify to actually get the coverage. So that is kind of the sweet spot. When people start to shop for long-term care insurance, and long-term care insurance is pricey, one of the biggest complaints that insurers heard and still hear is, oh,

Am I really going to pay thousands of dollars every year for a policy that I hope never to use and I may never use?

And the insurance industry came back and said, well, if you don't use the benefits, we'll give you a product where the value of the money that you put in can get passed along to your heirs. That is what this financial advisor is offering to you. My feeling is that you should do some shopping around.

You should take the conversation to not a financial planner, but a true life insurance agent who sells a whole lot.

lot of long-term care insurance and run the numbers so that you can see the difference in cost between a standalone long-term care policy that's just going to pay for long-term care or home care and a policy like this, which is called a hybrid policy. And then you'll be able to figure out which one makes sense for you.

Based on the value of your assets and the fact that you both have pensions, you are in the sweet spot for long-term care insurance. Long-term care insurance typically makes the most sense for people who have a few million dollars in assets.

If you have significantly less, you'll spend your money down and then you'll qualify for Medicaid if you were to need long-term care. If you have significantly more, you can invest your money and you can pay for your own care. But in the middle is where a lot of people say, you know, if I had to come out of pocket to pay for long-term care for me and then long-term care for my spouse, that's

there would not be as much left to leave my children or my charities as I might hope. Personally, I bought what this financial advisor is recommending. I bought a policy into which I paid for 10 years. I'm almost done. Actually, I bought it at age 53. And by the time I am

63, I'll be done paying for it. I will be able to draw on those benefits for long-term care if I need it. But if I don't need it, there will be a death benefit that goes to my kids. And if I use a little bit of it, the rest of the money will go to my kids. And that is what made sense to me when I was shopping. As for the tax benefits, yeah, there's some

tax benefits to allowing money to grow in a life insurance policy. As with retirement accounts, that money grows tax-free. As with retirement accounts, that money grows in a tax-advantaged way. But that's not why I would

I would buy this policy because you have a need for the insurance, because you can afford the insurance. And the last thing I would do is I would buy this policy because I have a need for the insurance.

The last thing that I want to say to you about this is that you should look and see if there is a policy that you can purchase for both of you and what the cost is on that. If you need to insure yourselves separately or if you can insure yourselves together, sometimes having a policy on two people is more cost effective than having a policy on one. But a little more shopping around would be my recommendation. I feel like

In your answer, I see why this is such a crazy decision, right? There's so many different avenues to explore. Like it's paralyzing. It's paralyzing and it's really, really pricey. And the thing about traditional long-term care is that the people who have had these policies for a while in the last few years have been getting notices from their insurers that their premiums are going way,

That's another risk with these traditional long-term care policies because the insurance companies, and I am not going to go down the rabbit hole all the way, but if you think back 15-ish years, we have had a decade and a half or we had a decade and a half of the lowest interest rates in history.

Insurance companies are highly restricted in how they are allowed to invest your money in order to make sure that they will be able to pay out premiums. And they didn't bank on 15 years of very, very low interest rates. So for them to make good on paying out these policies, they're having to raise premiums.

And that's been a squeeze that a lot of people just did not expect. You don't get that kind of a surprise with a hybrid policy because you're buying a certain bucket of benefits. Interesting. A lot to think about. It is. My husband and I just priced whole life versus term. And it was like $200 a month for term and $13,000 a month for whole life.

Yeah, for the same amount of coverage, right? But we thought it was like wrong. We thought it was like a joke. We literally were like, oh, that's funny. They got the numbers mixed up. And then we were like, oh my God, I had no idea it was that extreme. So with the whole life policy, there will be a date at which you no longer have to pay, right? You'll pay into the policy for a certain period of time. And then you'll have that coverage for

forever. It'll build a cash value that will never go away. With term insurance, the price will go up as you age, right? The logic behind term insurance is, or used to be, that you buy it until you've gotten to retirement, paid off your mortgage, put your kid through college, and basically we're

taken care of all of those expenses where somebody else is really reliant on your income, then you drop it. And the fact that it's so much more expensive when you're 70 years old doesn't matter because you're not paying for it anymore. Things have happened in our world that are making people want

life insurance longer. Think about adult children moving back in with older parents. Think about people having babies later, right? All of those things mean you might need life insurance for a longer period of time. People who have special needs children have a need often for a life insurance policy forever.

And so in those cases, looking at a term policy that you can eventually convert to whole life or a whole life policy or some sort of other permanent insurance from the get go sometimes makes sense. Interesting.

Thank you, Jean. Sure. Catherine, I know we had another question, but I think we should just save it for another show because I went on an insurance tangent. I love it. Honestly, we could talk for another 15 minutes on this topic. But yes, we'll leave it there and I'll come back to help answer the others. Sounds good. And if you've got any other money related questions, we would love to hear from you. Just send them our way by emailing us at

at mailbagathermoney.com. Thanks so much to Jay Fineman for sharing his thoughts on the changes we can make as individuals and society to make the insurance system work better for all of us. If you love this episode, please give us a five-star review on Apple Podcasts. We always value your feedback. And if you want to keep the financial conversations going, join me for a deeper dive.

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