The Differentiator Your Clients Are Missing

I grew up in Dorchester, a Boston neighborhood that teaches you to move fast and keep your guard up. But more than 20 years ago, I came to Cincinnati and built a life here I wouldn't trade for anything. That move from Dorchester to Cincinnati didn't just change my location, it changed how I interacted with people. I learned a lot about what it meant to be "Midwest Nice."

It just goes to show that the instincts that serve you in one place don't always serve you in the next. Sometimes you have to relearn how you approach things, even the things you think you've already got figured out.

Lately, I’ve thought about that a lot when it comes to long-term care (LTC) benefits in my territory (IN & OH). I know that brokers here know how to engage clients in meaningful benefit conversations. But I’ve found that LTC calls for a different approach than the one we’re typically used to; less about pitching the product and more about solving the challenges employees are already living with. When you take the time to relearn that approach, LTC can become one of the most useful conversations you can bring to your clients.

The Care Crisis in Indiana and Ohio 

Here’s the first thing worth relearning: Long-term care (LTC) isn't a someday problem. For my fellow Ohioans and neighbors in Indiana, it's already showing up in the households of the employees your clients rely on every day.

In Ohio, AARP estimates that 2.2 million people are already caregivers for adults, putting in 1.61 billion hours of care a year. If that work were paid at market rate, it would be worth $32 billion annually.¹
Indiana tells a similar story. AARP also estimates that 1.2 million adults (24% of the state) are family caregivers. Of those caregivers, 63% are also working full or part time, often cutting hours — or leaving jobs entirely to keep up — which puts their own retirement and financial security at risk.²

These statistics aren’t unique; it’s a crisis that’s impacting the entire country. But for those of us in the industry, these stats beg the question: What can we do to help employers across IN and OH combat the LTC crisis? Showing them the power of life with LTC benefits is a good place to start. 

How Employer-Paid Life With LTC Actually Works

That leads to the second thing worth relearning: Life with LTC isn’t just a voluntary benefit, it can be an employer-paid benefit, too.

That fact tends to surprise many broker and employer groups in this region who are used to offering long-term care on a stand-alone, employee-paid basis. It’s also one of the many reasons I joined Trustmark. I saw that, with Trustmark, LTC benefits don’t have to be one size fits all and can actually solve many of the challenges faced by employers in this region.

In the case of Trustmark, the offerings are flexible, which can help you offer LTC benefits to your groups in a way that benefits them and their employees. For example, you could:

1. Structure it as a true employer-paid benefit, where the group pays the benefit for every employee, giving the entire workforce a baseline of protection without anyone reaching into their own paycheck
2. Offer it to your clients as an executive carve-out, funding richer LTC and life coverage for key leaders while still making a voluntary version available to the rest of the team
3. Offer the group the flexibility to do both: fund a benefit for everyone, then layer additional coverage on top for executives and key employees they most want to retain

And, whether you offer it as employer-paid or as a regular voluntary benefit, each product comes standard with added caregiving benefits from Cariloop®, giving your clients the flexibility to turn LTC from something their employees quietly wish they had into something their employer actually gave them.

The Employer-Paid Opportunity for Brokers

And here's the last thing worth relearning, and maybe the most important one: Life with LTC isn't just another line item to sell. Most of your groups have never had the LTC conversation — especially not one involving employer-paid LTC. It’s not because they don't care about their people, but because no other broker has brought it to them in a way that connects the dots between the caregiving strain, financial protection, and retention.

That can be your opening. Your differentiator in the market.

When you bring employer-paid LTC to your clients, you're solving a problem their employees are already living with, whether the employer realizes it or not. When you can approach it that way, you lose the perception that your just another vendor pitching another product. You start looking like the partner who actually understands what's going on inside their workforce.

That shift, from vendor to partner, can be worth more to your book of business than any single sale, and it's the whole reason this LTC approach is worth relearning in the first place.

^{Sources:
1 Economic Value of Family Caregiving in Ohio Reaches $32 Billion Annually, New AARP Report Shows. AARP Ohio. 2026.
2 AARP Indiana Releases State-Level Data Detailing Caregiving Prevalence in Indiana. AARP States. 2026.}