Chamber hears about AFLAC opportunities

By Alberta Stojkovic –

AFLAC rep­re­sen­ta­tive, Mark Schaeufele spoke at the Chamber’s Novem­ber meet­ing about the health insur­ance company’s poli­cies for groups and busi­nesses. Schaeufele gave a brief his­tory of the com­pany, which began with the door-to-door sell­ing of can­cer poli­cies in 1955. The com­pany has become well known in recent years for its ad cam­paign with the AFLAC duck.

Schaeufele empha­sized that there is no cost to busi­nesses or orga­ni­za­tions who sign on with AFLAC since the employ­ees’ poli­cies are paid for by pay­roll deduc­tions. The poli­cies are a sup­ple­ment to health insur­ance poli­cies. Although there are a num­ber of dif­fer­ent types of poli­cies, the pri­mary one pur­chased is for hos­pi­tal­iza­tion. It fills in the gaps in major med­ical and puts money directly into the insured person’s pocket when they are unable to work.

Schaeufele pointed out that 60% of bank­rupt­cies are due to cat­a­strophic med­ical bills and 77% of those bank­rupt­cies already have med­ical insur­ance. The claims dol­lars from AFLAC go directly to the client for what­ever is needed by them.

As well as being no cost to a busi­ness, Schaeufele said AFLAC helps attract and retain employ­ees, offers poten­tial tax sav­ings, com­pli­ments exist­ing ben­e­fits and is easy to admin­is­ter. The most pop­u­lar polices writ­ten are the acci­dent pol­icy, short term dis­abil­ity and cancer/specified dis­ease pol­icy. The aver­age pay­out on the can­cer pol­icy is over $400,000. Other poli­cies include den­tal, vision, life, crit­i­cal ill­ness and disability.

Dur­ing the dis­cus­sion period after Schaeufele’s talk, sev­eral orga­ni­za­tions and busi­nesses said they already had AFLAC for their employ­ees and vouched for the advan­tages of the sup­ple­men­tal insurance.

Cham­ber of Com­merce Pres­i­dent, Dan Boy­sel, asked mem­bers to mark their cal­en­dars for sev­eral Decem­ber events. Busi­ness After Hours will be on Wed. Dec. 5th at Hos­pice of Mor­row County from 5 to 6:30 p.m. The Christ­mas Fes­ti­val will be held on Sat. Dec. 8th in Down­town Mount Gilead. The Theme for the Christ­mas Fes­ti­val this year is “Have a Mag­i­cal Christmas”.

The next Cham­ber noon lun­cheon will be on Tues. Dec. 18, 2012 at Cor­ner­stone Restau­rant in Mount Gilead from noon to 1 p.m. The speaker will be Nicole Work­man from Mar­ion Tech­ni­cal College.

Posted by Randa Wagner on Nov 28 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.