Do you still make house calls?

Back in the old days, doctors did business a little differently – rather than making the patient come to them, they went to the patient, medical bag in hand. The society was more rural at the time, hospitals were fewer and further between, and most patients would either recover or die at home, in their own bed. Over time, this started to change – physicians realized they could do more business and provide better results by seeing patients in a set location, so they traded in their black bag for a clinic with a waiting room.

Sometime later they stopped taking chickens and pigs as payment, opting instead for cash and insurance. The funny thing is, the majority of insurance agents still do business like the doctors of yesteryear. No, we normally don’t accept farm animals in lieu of commission, but we do make “house calls” most if not all of the time. That’s certainly how I got my start in insurance. In 1997, I was hired by a Medicare Advantage company – at the time it was called Medicare + Choice – to sell their Medicare HMO product.