Ben Oehler, Chairman
Why and how did the former CEO of the family office for Cargill decide to embrace a new view of long-term care? The short answer is, it happened because Ben Oehler is steeped in the disciplines of financial and situational analysis and relies on the numbers to manage risk and make the right decisions. The long answer is of course more complex.

For more than thirty years, Ben has served as trusted advisor to owners of businesses and philanthropic organizations. From 1999 through 2007 he was President and CEO of Waycrosse, the family office for many owners of Cargill Incorporated, one of the largest private companies in the world. He concurrently served as President and Chairman of the Board for WayTrust, a regulated South Dakota Trust Company which saw eight years of successful operations during his tenure. Ben retired from those ventures in 2007 and founded Bashaw Group, strategic advisors to privately-owned businesses in the area of financial strategy, capital structure and liquidity options.

In the prior decade Ben was Managing Director and Group Head for US Bancorp Piper Jaffray in Minneapolis, where he built a successful team of traders, analysts and bankers. His prior financial industry experience includes Partner at Goan Dolan Oehler, experts in specialized corporate transactions, and Vice President of Dain Bosworth, where he was in charge of the Valuations Department and Tax Sheltered Investments. His career features extensive pro bono work and diverse client advisory experience including Northern States Power, Control Data, Burger King, Pentair, Bemis and JP Morgan Investment Management.

In all these roles, Ben was exposed to standard financial industry beliefs about long term care. Like his fellow professionals, he remained current by attending industry conferences and reading professional journals. In these forums and in discussions with attorneys, accountants and financial planners about various client matters, the overwhelming consensus was that long-term care insurance (LTCi) is not a useful tool for risk mitigation and LTC should not be considered an insurable risk like health.

How and why did these beliefs take hold? Ben’s decades in financial services roughly parallel the evolution of the long-term care insurance and care management industries. In the beginning, LTCi was literally “nursing home insurance”; even though the product has evolved to cover assisted living facilities and home health care (including 24/7 home care and offering flexible cash features), it retains the nursing home label which is both a stigma and one of the sources of ongoing, wrong-headed misperceptions. Another source was the insurance industry actively positioning LTCi as a niche middle income product for “those with between $100,000 and $500,000 in assets”, lured by the volume potential of the middle market and side-stepping the challenges of the more sophisticated high net worth market.

The experts who advise the wealth management industry bought into this limited understanding and built ill-informed arguments to support these ideas about the inappropriateness of LTCi for loss mitigation. There were too few credible voices who spoke the attorneys’ and financial planners’ language to challenge the popular advice and change the misperceptions. Other barriers are raised by the fact that long-term care is hard to talk about and raises uncomfortable emotional issues; it is not addressed by traditional health and life insurers who focus on what's covered rather than what's not; and finally, high net worth financial advisors are not typically trained in this area and understandably don't want to raise issues they're not prepared to fully address.

In a related area, a new discipline was emerging that focused on evidence-based best practices for geriatric wellness and care. It offers planning and support for optimizing independence and aging well, taking advantage of lessons learned from thousands of clinical studies and positioned to benefit from future learning. By working with family members to create and manage a plan for seniors to optimize their lives, geriatric risk managers take a proactive stance in detecting disease earlier, enhancing independence and prolonging quality of life.

Despite the common wisdom against using LTCi as a wealth management strategy, on countless occasions Ben witnessed how literally millions of dollars could be spent on long-term care for even one family member. In late 2008 he was introduced to a new professional team with skills in financial planning, LTC insurance and care management. The team was considering offering (for the first time) a client-centered approach combining senior wellness and use of LTCi as a numbers-driven risk mitigation tool. This group demonstrated scientific support for the benefits of pro-active LTC services where RN and social worker care managers oversee senior wellness training and care management whenever needed. These facts quickly resonated with Ben because of his experiences with long-term care events with clients and in his own family, where access to senior wellness training and better care management would have made a tremendous positive difference.

This group of professionals also introduced Ben to the concept that LTCi is in reality health insurance. Long-term care is universal, with the average person having a 50/50 chance of needing extended personal care after age 65. This number is even greater for high net worth individuals, whose life-long access to quality health care makes them longer-lived and more susceptible to age-related frailty. While they can afford the high cost of quality 24/7 home health care (which makes experts’ assertions about the low cost of nursing homes an irrelevant argument for this market), there is simply no need to spend millions of dollars when insurance is available to cover the risk at a much lower cost. In the absence of LTCi, the only way to pay for extended care is out of investments, and respected industry journals have long touted this self-funding approach as the proper way for high net worth families to fund LTC − a concept that is not logical considering the high probability of use, and unreasonable when one begins working the numbers.

The next step in Ben’s change of view came when he was exposed to Ralph Leisle’s sophisticated LTCi financial planning software, and then spent hours working with it. It’s not enough to know that there should be coverage without asking the all important question: is this the best use of those premium dollars? Trained academically and professionally in investment analysis, he knows the insurance industry’s numbers don't always stand up to rigorous analysis, with life insurance as a prime example. Fundamentally, Ben is numbers-driven and he had to satisfy himself in terms of NPV, IRR and ROI that LTCi was a good use of funds. After extensive work with multiple scenarios, he came away convinced that the numbers were correct and told a dramatically different story than the common wisdom for the high net worth market. Becoming convinced of these objective conclusions, Ben realized that he and his colleagues had been getting years of inappropriate advice from experts across the board.

Armed with this new understanding, Ben came to see LTC as a basic insurable risk. Just as we strongly recommend insurance for health, jewelry and fine art loss and theft, auto and umbrella liability, we should now include LTCi as essential protection. The proposition is a simple one: LTCi is a good investment for anyone who has assets to protect, and for high net worth individuals it offers strong leverage and numerous advantages over self-insuring. As Ben sees it, if you'll insure a $500,000 diamond ring against loss or theft, why wouldn't you insure against the greater chance of needing extended care that can cost far more?

Had he understood all of this sooner, Ben is certain that he would have done everything he could to protect his clients with LTCi policies. He now sees it as an essential tool to manage the fiduciary and the health risks created by clients' need for long-term care. He also sees the tremendous value that relationship managers can bring by offering their clients training about new advances in senior wellness and quality care management options. By agreeing to serve as Chairman for LTC Risk Advisors, Ben has seized the opportunity to collaborate with wealth management firms to maximize client assets and redress the long-standing imbalance in how long-term care is viewed, understood and conveyed in our industry.

As Ben describes the mission of LTC Risk Advisors: “We are facing an unprecedented – and avoidable – intergenerational drain of capital due to uninsured long-term care costs. If houses were burning, everyone would say, “You made sure we were insured? You took precautionary steps, right?” In the next twenty years, half our clients over the age of 50 are facing uninsured losses – multi-million dollar losses for many. Do our clients understand this? Do they understand how they can minimize this risk – just like they can minimize the risk of loss if there is a house fire?”