Why don’t insurers empower their customers to make healthier choices? That question drove Brooks Tingle CEO of John Hancock, to reimagine the life insurance model and spotlight a powerful alignment: What’s good for customers is also good for business.
“Our customers generally want to live a longer, healthier, better life. We want that too,” Tingle shared in a session titled “Why Life Insurance Cares More About Your Longevity Than Health Insurance” at DOC 2025 with Private Medical’s founder and CEO, Dr. Jordan Shlain.
Better lifestyle choices — from walking more to logging better sleep — are just one element of John Hancock’s approach to its Vitality program, which offers education, tools, resources and incentives to help customers take small, everyday steps towards better health, and rewards those healthy activities. Since the program launched 10 years ago, offerings have shifted more towards preventive care. But the company goes even further, encouraging — and covering the cost in many cases — diagnostic testing and wearables that can pick up early signs of disease, such as GRAIL’s Galleri test, which can detect more than 50 cancers via a simple blood draw.
John Hancock’s decision to fund this program is backed by science, what Tingle calls “medical meets actuarial meets behavioral,” he says. The numbers are starting to prove that those who participate in John Hancock Vitality live longer.
“Life insurance like this is about living,” he says. “It’s been great for us because traditionally, life insurance is something you do for somebody else. Now it’s like, ‘Life insurance can actually help me.’”
You can hear more from this conversation between Tingle and Dr. Shlain in our video of the session or read our transcript below for more details.
TRANSCRIPT
Dr. Jordan Shlain
Insurance. How many people love insurance? Raise your hand. No health insurance. I think we all categorically, find it like a brick wall and not our advocate not trying to help us. It’s been the bane of a lot of our existences. I recently, met Brooks, who said, “I actually am investing in the health of my of my life insurance.” Let’s talk. Brooks.You’re the CEO of John Hancock. Tell us why we care so much about the health of your customers.
Brooks Tingle
Who here owns life insurance in one form or fashion? I know it’s probably the most exciting elements of your life. Let me let you in on a little bit of secret about your life that you may not know. I’m sure you all have people that care about you deeply. Friends, family. They all want you to live a long, healthy life. No one wants you to live a longer, healthier life more than your life insurance company does.
You may not realize it, but we’re thinking about you every day. If it’s not intuitive or obvious, this a smart group, I’m sure it’s obvious, but let me tell you how we make money. We issue you a policy, we collect your premiums. I have smart investment people that invest those premiums. The longer we get to collect and invest those premiums, guess what, the more money we make. When you contrast it with, with health insurance, our interests are perfectly aligned with our customers, our customers generally want to live a longer, healthier, better life. Guess what? We want that too.
I have many friends that are CEOs of health insurance companies, but they have sort of a conflicted paradigm they’re operating with, really around the time dimension of their relationship with their customers. People switch employers now every four years or switching health plans all the time. I talked to CEOs of health companies and it drives me nuts. One of the CEOs of the Blues the other day said they’re going to stop covering GLP-1s for obesity. That’s so shortsighted, why. [They said], Well, we need to have a 2.1 year payback period, and we’re not seeing it in our business and our industry.
Our average length of a relationship with a customer is close to three decades. We paid a death claim recently where the client had been a client for 99 years. Parents bought the kid a policy on his first birthday and died shortly after her 100th birthday. So we are in a really unique position as an industry where we have huge motivation to want people to live longer, healthier, better lives, and we have a huge period of time over which to try to engage customers and help achieve that outcome.
Dr. Shlain
Amazing. How do you engage your customers around health? You’re talking about life and usually you set it and forget it with life insurance, right? You just pay the premiums and hope you never have to get the benefit, right.
Tingle
Ten years ago, we introduced an app called Vitality. Boy, it’s never smart for a CEO to compare himself to the airlines. If you think about airline frequent flier programs. The more you fly, you earn a status. The status gives you different perks. What’s somewhat similar about through this app, anything and everything you do that correlates with longevity. You earn points for a certain amount of physical activity. Yesterday. You get points, a good night’s sleep last night. You get points going for preventative screenings. You get points buying healthy food at the grocery store. I could go on and on. Thousands and thousands of ways to earn points. Those points accumulate and you get a status just like the airlines bronze, silver, gold and platinum. The higher your status in our program, the larger the premium discount you enjoy, but the larger the value of a whole bunch of other rewards. I can get into as much or little as you want. But I would say the fascinating part of this, having been in it ten years, is the behavioral science part of it. We can now see what actually motivates people to take those extra steps or go for that preventative screening. It’s not always what you think.
People can earn huge amounts of savings, dollars and cents wise, through the premium discounts by being involved in our program. But to a person, the thing they get the most excited about is the silly game that we have called the Vitality Wheel. It’s like the Wheel of Fortune. Every 10th workout you complete, your mobile device shakes and says, you’ve earned it, now spin it. It’s a Wheel of Fortune thing. The prizes are, I mean, like $5 at Starbucks, $10 at Amazon. And I have billionaires with a B texting me saying, I just got $10 at Amazon.
Dr. Shlain
Can you control whether they buy chewing gum and candy?
Tingle
No. We could have a long talk about carrots and sticks. We’re all about carrots. It’s sort of like frequent flier program. The more you do that correlates with longevity. I will just say one of the things that we’ve added to the program, recently that’s been really important, and I see a strong focus on it here, Jordan, is early detection. Our macro thesis probably isn’t different than a lot of people here, that way too much money in the health care system goes to treatment. I’m not proposing that treatment dollars be taken away. But much more needs to be invested in prevention. That’s fundamentally what our program is about. Be physically active.
We offer our customers a 25% discount on purchases of fresh fruits and vegetables and over 61,000 stores and grocery stores in the US. Encouraging good preventative care.
Dr. Shlain
How do you track that? Is there like a card to go to the store to, through customer loyalty programs?
Tingle
We have partners. The rate at their cash rate or it’s kind of talking about a life insurance company being a boring part of your life? We used to have one or two interactions with our customers a yea. When we sent you a bill, and maybe when we sent you a privacy notice, I’m sure it’s a big time in the family when the privacy notice we all got around. Now we have 20 or 30 interactions with our customers a month now.
You go to the grocery store, you take advantage of your discount right on the receipt. It’ll say $5 bag of apples, minus 25% John Hancock. It’s pretty cool as a marketer. The early detection has been a huge part of the program, though, because I can tell you again, back to behavioral science, a lot of our clients and a lot of the brokers who sell our products thought, well, this is cool, but if my client engages or if I engage, I’ll live to 91 instead of 88. That’s kind of an abstract concept when you’re in your 30s, 40s or 50 buying life insurance. As we brought, some of these early detection tools, whether it’s Grail or things like that, to the program, we’ve seen a huge uptick because now people are like, oh, this could save my life tomorrow. That’s been a huge innovation for us, and we’re excited about it.
Dr. Shlain
Talk about the vitality program. What specific things. So 25% off on what Grail?
Tingle
You can get up to 25% off your actual life insurance premium, which again, oddly, people don’t get the most excited about it for some reason. It’s probably the most valuable thing. You’re at our highest status level for three years. You can get a free Amazon Prime subscription. You get discounted hotel stays through our hotel partner, Expedia, based on status. But on these preventative screening, capabilities have come to market recently, the economics of our business are such that we can offer free Galleri tests. I don’t know if Grail is here.
Dr. Shlain
Yeah. They’re here. That’s an $800-ish test. These are not inexpensive tests
Tingle
For any one of our customers over 50 years old with $1 million policy or larger, our economics are such that we can actually pay for that every year for that customer. In fact, if you stopped by our I’m not promoting our booth, but if you stop by the Grail booth, you’ll see a video from one of our customers who learned that they had early stage cancer because they happened to buy a life insurance policy from us. We have dozens and dozens of those testimonials now.
In some cases, we’re able to fully subsidize things again because of the economics. You think about the health insurer. I’ve got 2.1 years to have this thing pay back. I have 40, 50 years for these investments we’re making to pay back.
Dr. Shlain
From a business standpoint, I want to talk about more of the preventative stuff. You just talked about the IRA, ROI for cancer obviously kill you, then you got to pay us in a premium. But what about these other ones like that are a little bit more slower burn. I think you mentioned you subsidize some biomarker testing. What is the I guess what is the process you employ at the company to do the math and also validate that these are the right things to do?
Tingle
We take a lot of pride in our program being very science-based. It’s sort of, medical science meets actuarial science, which I know is everybody’s favorite and meets behavioral science. We can take a very, very long term view when we issue a policy, we set up reserves for it, and if we’re able to confidently, with science backing us, assume that on average, this cohort of customers participating in this program will live eight months longer on average, we can actually sort of monetize that today. That’s the economic fuel for this whole program. That’s how I can afford to buy a Grail Galleri test for people and give people discounts at the grocery store.
It’s a really powerful model. In general on this topic of longevity, we all need to be looking for where those interests are so aligned. I actually talk about the economics of our business. So people know, I mean it when I really want to help people that live longer, healthier lives. But we believe in it too.
Dr. Shlain
We just sort of panel that life and, life span of women is improved with, with, menopause, with hormone therapy. It’s not hormone replacement therapy. I want to make sure I got that right. Are you doing anything in that category with the with women and customers?
Tingle
First of all, that was an amazing panel. A couple of fun facts. Women, on average, are more drawn to our program. Women on average, engage more and reach higher status levels. I’m not an expert that it does appear to be a higher level of engagement among women around these types of things. We don’t have program elements that are specific to the hormone therapies yet. But, took a lot of notes during that session.
Dr. Shlain
think the programs are starting to come online where women can actually figure out what the right thing to do for themselves is. So what other things are in the vitality program.
Tingle
The fun thing about the program, having been at it ten years is we’re always studying, I know that sounds really fun, we’re always studying why people die. We have a 163 year old company and we have just reams of actuarial data, and we know why people die, what they do. The fascinating thing, which is not news to anybody here, is the majority of deaths in the U.S now are from these lifestyle diseases. There’s never been a better time for us to try to engage our customers and with the advent of wearables and things like that, it makes it so easy. Because customers will not participate in a program like I’m talking about, if it takes work. If you have to go to a website and website sounds old fashioned, you have to go into an app and say, hey, I took 10,000 steps yesterday, no one’s going to do that. We connect with every wearable on the planet, and once they sync it, we got a steady stream of data on their steps so we can just give points. With my Oura ring, I can get the occasional nights, I get a good night’s sleep, I can get points for a good night’s sleep, and things like that.
Wearables are a big part of it. Preventative screenings. People get points for routine screenings like, mammograms. Colonoscopy is maintaining healthy biometrics. We’re connected with Quest Labs. What we’re really excited about now is you can imagine all the data that we have, right down to what people are buying at the grocery store and things like that.
Dr. Shlain
With frequent flier miles, there’s whole websites, industries about how do you game that system. Are there any people gaming, they put their Oura ring on a treadmill, press play and then they eat some hamburgers and then they got a bunch of steps.
Tingle
I always find it very revealing about the person that asked the question. What kind of mind do we have here? It’s funny. Believe it or not, we spent quite a lot of time studying the science of people that cheat. It turns out cheating is generally not sustainable. The early generation wearables, I remember being at a football game with my son and he figured out that if he clapped, he was getting points for steps. So he kept clapping randomly for the whole third quarter, and by the end of the third quarter, he’s like, this is stupid. So yes, there are you can find a site that says, put your Fitbit on top of a drill and spend the drill around and you’ll get stats. But again, we have relationships with our customers that are going to be decades. By the way, that technology is so much better now in terms of being able to share. You can try to cheat if you want. Jordan.
Dr. Shlain
Why aren’t other life insurance companies following your suit? This seems like such a natural no brainer. The part two is it almost seems like the life insurance companies could morph into the new health insurance companies that actually care about you. Somebody said to me last night, I think health insurance companies days are numbered in the United States based on their bad behavior. Now they are a massive cabal, that have a tremendous grip on everything. I guess the first question is why aren’t other health insurance companies copying you?
Tingle
It’s really confounding. It’s hard. It’s not easy. I imagine the investments we made in the science, medical meets actuarial meets behavioral, you got to have the app and be connected to every wearable and all the stuff. It’s not it’s not easy, but it’s worth every bit of it. My greatest passion is helping our customers try to live longer, healthier, better lives. Once a week now, we hear from somebody saying, hey, my life insurance saved my life. I mean, corny, real stuff.
My second greatest passion is trying to get every other CEO or every other life insurance company in the US to do the same stuff. Because I can guarantee you no segment of the economy will benefit more if longevity becomes a real thing than the life insurance industry. Even if just in overt self-interest, why are you not investing? It’s a bizarre thing when you think about like those of you that have purchased life insurance, you go through this ghastly process called underwriting where we we collect all your medical information, we get your blood and urine, all this crazy stuff, and, we issue you a policy and then sit back and say, I sure hope you live a long, healthy life. But we do nothing to try to achieve that outcome.
I always say to my colleagues, if you don’t love what we’re doing or whatever, fine, do something different. I’m pushing. I do think like health insurance, I hate to say, but health insurance is sort of sick insurance, right? You use it when you get sick. Life insurance really was in for everybody else other than us. Now death insurance it pays when you die. It sounds corny, but we’re trying to make it. Life insurance like this is about living. It’s been very great for us because traditionally, life insurance is something you do for somebody else. Now it’s like, hey, this life insurance can actually help me.
Dr. Shlain
Maybe you should call longevity insurance. What about, GLP-1s then? Are you subsidizing those because those seem to be have I mean, what we heard from Eric and other people earlier today, Dr. Verdin, have a profound impact. I know that maybe it takes more data to put that in.
Tingle
The data is pretty compelling. We spent a lot of time, we have these weird entities, we work with called reinsurers that study all this stuff. We talk to all the smart people, and there’s not much to say. I don’t think there’s much question now about their benefit. We haven’t played a direct role in subsidizing them. Our customers are rewarded for the outcomes that they achieve. If you maintain and I know BMI is an outdated thing, we’re going to replace, but healthy BMI, healthy blood pressure, healthy cholesterol, you get large amounts of points for those things. But with some of the people, like the health insurers pulling back on funding the GLP-1s, we’re kind of looking at us saying, do we need to step in, maybe. Because it could be enormously, enormously beneficial for us to have more people taking them under the right circumstances.
Dr. Shlain
Excellent. I want to open up to questions for Brooks.
Audience member
I just, asked what percentage of Americans have life insurance because I didn’t know the answer and it said roughly 50%.
Dr. Shlain
What was the number?
Audience member
About 55%? But about half of that is through employer or group, and a lot of people, me included, when I leave my employer, don’t necessarily go get individual life insurance. If there’s such a small percentage, let’s say it’s there somewhere under 50%, such a small percentage of people have life insurance, and it’s such a big contributor to longevity. What can companies like you can do or we can do, to make sure more people are getting life insurance so that we’re also helping longevity.
Tingle
Thank you for the question.If you’ve ever known somebody has passed away unexpectedly or otherwise without a life insurance, not to be corny, but it can be a real issue. It is disturbing how many people don’t actually have it, but my obligation is to try to make life insurance more relevant to today’s consumers in today’s economy. This whole thing started around ten years ago. I woke up saying, I’m a leader in an industry that sells a product that no one gets any joy whatsoever from owning.
When was the last time you were excited about having life insurance? It’s like, I have to have it or something. By far is the most difficult to product to purchase in the modern digital economy. Buying a home can be complicated, but your realtor doesn’t ask you for your blood and urine. So I said we have to set out to make life insurance more, dare I say fun? It’s gamified for fun, engaging, relevant to you while you’re living. So it’s not just I’m buying this, or if I get hit by a car some day my kids will be okay. Which is important, don’t get me wrong, but we have to make it more than that. We’re seeing enormous tailwinds on this, and easier to buy, too, with all the data that’s out there now, electronic health records, we’re making major advances in terms of people having it be easy to buy life insurance. I’d love for if you were here today and thought, that sounds kind of cool, I want to do it. Just be able to like click on a QR code rather than me say, I’ll send an agent to your house and we got a doctor’s report and all this stuff. Right. We’re trying to streamline that, but, I think we’re on the right track, but we have to be more relevant.
The interest in this stuff. Jordan, you and this conference is a great example. Our customers, I mean, the so-called longevity economy, the wellness economy, our burgeoning. I think we’re in the right space here with what we’re trying to do. One of the roles we play, which I know you do, Jordan, this conference, I love the references to snake oil. I can’t even tell you how many thousands of actuaries I employ. They’re fun people. But we’re entirely science based, right?
If we say we’re going to put something on this platform, it’s because science has demonstrated that this makes sense. We’re not going to put the latest fad.
Dr. Shlain
One question where you get to, is just for everybody here because I don’t know the answer to what does $1 million life insurance cost.
Tingle
For you.
Dr. Shlain
For me.
Tingle
I saw you at the bar last night.
Dr. Shlain
I was playing music. What are you talking about?
Tingle
It varies dramatically. For somebody in their 40s, $1 million. If you’re buying term insurance was just for a certain duration of time, it could be a thousand bucks or something
Dr. Shlain
A year or month
Tingle
A year. And then a permanent life insurance policy that’ll stay with you, forever. A few grand.
Dr. Shlain
Okay. Everybody should have it. Dr. Snyder.
Dr. Mike Snyder
I love this plan. What are your thoughts about whole body MRI and genome sequencing? Incorporating those into it?
Tingle
Great questions. I don’t know where this group is, throw things at me if you want. I just did my second whole body MRI. I’m a huge fan. One of the reasons I’m so like not bought into prevention being the only thing is my mom never smoked a cigarette in her life, never had a drink in her life, worked out every day and got lung cancer at 64 and was dead in eight months. She got it, presumably sooner, but because she was a nonsmoker, they didn’t look for it. So you can do everything right?You can do everything right and still have lousy luck, right? So prevention, prevention, prevention and early detection.
I personally love the whole body scans. We actually have a partnership with Prenuvo. Our customers get a 25% discount for online access. We’ve had many customers come to us and say, hey, just because I happen to do this thing, I had an aneurysm. Genetic stuff is interesting. This is another place where I really am out of step with our industry. The life insurance industry has had a very conflicted relationship with the genetic testing space. Most of my peers would say bad, bad, bad, don’t allow it. Or if it is allowed, we need to know. I think they’ve got it all wrong. Their fear is what we call anti-selection that people are going to find out something and go run, get life, load up on life insurance. You guys know better than me. But, you know those most of those tests aren’t perfectly predictive of much. Unfortunately, male pattern baldness is one. But other than that and a few other things, they’re not perfectly predictive of much. It’s mostly higher or lower elevation, but my belief is in the future, that imagine if we have customers that find out they’re predisposed to, say, elevated risk of colon cancer, you can be darn sure they’re going to go for their colonoscopy every year if they find out that elevated risk of type two diabetes, they’re more likely to participate in our program. So again, I’m kind of alone in our industry where I’d like to see genetic testing be almost ubiquitous, standard of care. And then I think net would some people find out they have something and run out and select against us? Maybe. But I think the net population outcome would be beneficial.
Dr. Shlain
By the way, you’re talking to the chairman of genetics. We’ve a question over here.
Audience member
Great presentation. I’m curious how, how involved are the reinsurers right now in terms of funding, partially, wholly. I would think it would make a lot of sense partnership with the reinsurers as well.
Tingle
I’m impressed. You know who reinsurers are. That’s awesome. They, reinsurers have been enormously supportive. When I say we fully fund the gallery test for our customers, reinsurers are backing their share of that. I would say, generally speaking, reinsurers have been more progressive than the direct writers. Reinsurers stand behind them. I’d say the reinsurers have actually been more progressive than the direct riders.
Dr. Shlain
One other question, I think might be our last one.
Audience member
I have a question about insurance and improving the likelihood of having the best insurance as a consumer. At the beginning of Covid, I put together emergency medical kits for a lot of patients and whatnot. I had tried to re-up my disability insurance and life insurance. I found that I was getting denied because although I paid cash for all these meds, I was kind of making it a mock emergency kit for myself that was going to get to my patients. I found out that the insurance said, no, you have every single disease known to mankind because you wrote all these meds. We are denying you point blank period. You can’t get insurance. When we know that the medical record system is probably inaccurate, what do we do to advise our patients? What do we do ourselves to improve the veracity and the accuracy of our own medical records, to prevent ourselves from inadvertently being declined? Are there choices that we make in terms of genetic testing or other things, or what do we do to protect ourselves so that we are not thinking that we’re doing something, but we can really be making a multimillion dollar mistake?
Tingle
It’s a great question. I know we’re out of time, but it’s a really important question because so many industries now are relying on electronic health records and used properly and responsibly, it can be an enormous benefit.
Why do we have to put people through this awful purchase process? If you’re willing to give us one time, limited use access to your health records? We don’t need to get your blood and urine and have you stand on a scale or get on a treadmill or whatever, we got rid of those, but, it would be great.
I remember I went for something and I’m, you know, I’m six foot one inch, and the person wrote down 61 inches. I’m not hugely proud of my BMI to start with, but at 61 inches, my BMI, I looked at, I saw my BMI, I’m like, what the heck? Now the good news, I would say, is most first of all, we would not use those things the way you described. I’m not sure who you are applying with or for what, but there are strict regulations about how we can underwrite people, and we wouldn’t have been able to deny you because you had purchased a bunch of whatever you purchased. But I do think it’s important to try to make sure your electronic health record is accurate. It’s tricky now because a lot of providers, I’m not a provider, but I know there’s this coding thing that goes on and you want to code it so the person gets it covered. But sometimes over coding can lead to something looking worse. So now the good news is we have really good analytics tools now, including AI, that can sift through massive electronic health records and find out, like my 61-inch height would have just been dismissed right away because six other places at six foot, one inch, and you can kind of dismiss it.
We can pretty good at kind of saying that’s not accurate. That’s an anomaly. That’s not right. I think it’s getting better. But it is important to make sure your records are accurate.
Dr. Shlain
Excellent. With that, let’s give a big hand to Brooks Tingle CEO John Hancock.