Friday the 13th! Always an ominous day, and one we happen to enjoy at The Lotus Talks. Today Granger Whitelaw profiles a business In S.E. Asia that helps Individuals, Families and Companies choose the proper Health & Life Insurance for their needs. Meet Asia Summit Consulting. Grab your coffee and, Let’s go !
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Below is a transcript of the episode, edited for readability.
Listen to the full episode at link here:
Granger whitelaw: Good morning. This is Granger Whitelaw with The Lotus talks. Its Friday morning, March 13th. That’s right. It’s Friday the 13th. Wow. I love Friday the 13th. I used to really always hope Friday the 13th would fall, in October for some reason. I think it’s cause it’s the same month as Halloween. And I thought, wow, it’s really cool if we could have Friday the 13th, right around Halloween so we could like – double down on the costumes and the spooky scary stuff. Of course, they always played the Halloween movies right back then.
Granger Whitelaw: DDDD DDD DDDD
Granger Whitelaw: Michael Myers. Anyway, well that’s good to laugh. Especially after just an unbelievably exhaustive week of Corona virus in everything, every conversation, everywhere, everyone, all the time. Its exhausting. One of my friends said it’s really stressful. I think the stress that it puts on the families and friends and on everyone is probably more damaging than anything. The mental stress that is putting on everybody and certainly the markets as we see, is horrible. And I really hope that there becomes a light here at the end of the tunnel soon. There seems to be some good news in places, China and others that are, even Korea, which are starting to have positive results turning this thing around and dealing with it.
Granger Whitelaw: But there’s just a lot of bad news. And if you look at the WHO now has declared the Corona virus a pandemic, you know, things like the NBA have now suspended their season, after a player tested positive for the virus. Tom Hanks and his wife Rita Wilson have now announced. They have the coronavirus – and there’s this terrible news everywhere about this thing and how it’s growing. And it’s certainly helping to crush our markets. Our financial markets are down. Futures are down about a 1000 points overnight. We launch this podcast, early in the morning so the markets won’t be open in the US yet, but the pressure is real. Pre-market stock trading. I was up in the middle of the night, heavy trading pressure in the NASDAQ and the S&P. The oil market’s not helping with the Saudi-Russia fight like we needed another issue to deal with right now.
Granger whitelaw: Sometimes it’s just exhausting and you want to say, you know, “give me a break already”, right? So have your coffee ready, and I want to talk about some things that you can do to help yourself at this time. We talked about health insurance in Vietnam and Southeast Asia on Monday for yourself, for your families, for your employees. Something that is really timely and we need to think about if you’re not thinking about it, if you haven’t done something about it, do it now. I don’t think premiums are going to go down. I think premiums are only going to go up. it’s a critical issue. You need to really think about things like outpatient, inpatient, co-pay, pre-existing condition, different things that may affect you and your family significantly or your employees. So there’s a company here that I know fairly well who consults.
Granger whitelaw: There’s a lot of companies, Health insurance companies certainly that you can speak to directly. But one that I would like to profile today is a company called – Asia Summit Consulting. Asia Summit Consulting is about a 50-year-old business including all the combined experience in Indochina and they’ve been known as the most successful insurance brokerage in the area over that time quite often. They are a family owned and family managed and their mantra really is to put the client’s interest first. And I know a lot of people say that but they really do it. Mark Seymour is a director of the company. Mark lives here in Saigon and a Jay Schlitz is a partner, along with Addison Seymour – Mark’s son…Ian McCullough, Nicole Berends and a good team of staff around them. I know because I’ve worked with them personally.
Granger Whitelaw: Asia Summit Consulting, covers a lot of areas. They cover health and medical insurance, life insurance, savings and investment for families. They have a really good claims department, and really do a good job consulting with you when you’re trying to figure out what’s the best solution for your company or for your family or just you as an individual. You know, working with a company, like Asia Summit Consulting will give you the options to have them manage the quote process for you. Manage the process for medical, for communication along the way, which can be a real hassle, especially, you know, if you don’t speak Vietnamese, or if you just don’t have the time to do it and you want somebody to help you through that arduous process of getting everything done properly on all the paperwork, et cetera.
Granger Whitelaw: So for corporate members, you know, dealing with risk analysis, coverage design, placement of the insurance, policy issuance, and then annual and daily service, they can also provide for you too. So that’s really cool. If you have a larger staff and you want someone to help outsource that management for you -= and that service for you, right? Then you have claims settlement support. This is really important. It’s not fun when you have to actually make a claim. And it’s one of the biggest complaints that I have and most people have. You know, okay, I can pay ahead for my insurance. but when am I gonna get my money back, right? And what’s the process for doing that?So one of these, one of the benefits of using a company like ASC and certainly, Asia summit consulting is there’re very good at this. They know the ins and outs of Vietnam & Indochina. They have been here for a long time. They have the ability to design the coverage for you, but implement.
Granger Whitelaw: They also have a blog that they have written and do provide information, updates, every so often – quarterly – on things that are affecting you. And they have a large, group of partners from Aetna to Morgan Price, William Russell, Bio Viet insurance here in Vietnam. A+ international healthcare, April group. So really good partners. Pacific cross, certainly Liberty, who are both here and Vietnam. Again, being able to go to one group that can kind of qualify what you need, place you with the right company, or potentially split your services between different companies based on different needs of different levels of management, or what have you.
Granger Whitelaw: If you don’t have your insurance squared away right now, it’s time. If you’ve been procrastinating – don’t. with the Corona virus going on and the normal influenza virus and, just normal life. You want to make sure you’re set. The best investment you can make is certainly an investment in yourself. And I know we all get lazy, especially when we’re younger and we think, Oh, I’m fine, can’t happen to me or I’ll get to it or I don’t know how to structure it for my employees. What’s the co-pay?, what’s the split have to be for my employees? how do I fund that? Well, these guys can help you sort that out and structure it so that you can figure out how to fund it and how to have an employee participant program, or a fully funded program. Take a look at Asia Summit Consulting. Look for Addison or Mark or any of the partners there, I’m sure there’ll be happy to help you out.
Granger Whitelaw: As we get into the weekend. I hope you can find some time to get some relaxation. Certainly Friday the 13th is upon us and so far, it’s a lucky day for me. I hope it’s a lucky day for you and I hope you all have a great weekend. Turn off the TV off. Stop watching the news.
Granger whitelaw: You know, take care of yourselves. Love your family, hang out with your friends. I’m going to go out and sing karaoke -> so Corona ain’t got no hold on me. Talk to you Monday until then. Have a great weekend. It’s Granger Whitelaw, with The Lotus Talks.
The Lotus Talks is produced by The Vietnam Group and Hosted by Granger Whitelaw.
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