One Voice Insurance Services to offer in-language, culturally relevant services.

[Harold F. Schiffman]

One Voice Insurance Services to offer in-language, culturally relevant
services.

Multicultural Agents Launch Online Service to Give Minorities Easy Access
to Health, Life Insurance in California

Los Angeles, CA (PRWeb) March 14, 2007 -- A former industry executive and
a network of leading multicultural agents later this week will launch One
Voice Insurance Services, an online portal designed to provide minority
consumers and business owners with in-language and culturally relevant
information about health and life insurance products in California. One
Voice Insurance Services will host a launch reception on Friday, March 16,
2007 at 5 p.m. at City Club on Bunker Hill, located at Wells Fargo Center,
333 S. Grand Ave., Suite 5450, in Downtown Los Angeles. Through its online
portal, www.onevoiceinsuranceservices.com, consumers will now be able to
access the network of independent agents throughout California that will
provide health and life insurance information in English, Spanish,
Mandarin Chinese, Cantonese, Korean and the Persian language of Farsi.
Agents who speak Vietnamese and Tagalog are expected to join the network
in April. Other languages will be added as the market need grows.

"Providing in-language and culturally relevant information about insurance
products and services in California allows us to educate the state's
growing, multicultural population and provide them affordable insurance
options that will address the individual needs of their families and
businesses," said Leonor McCall-Rodriguez, president of One Voice
Insurance Services and a former executive with Blue Cross of California.
Approximately 6.6 million Californians have no health insurance--with 75
percent of those residents identified as ethnic minorities. Nearly 60
percent of the uninsured are Latinos. "In Mexico and other parts of Latin
America, the government provides health care virtually free of charge,"
said agent-partner Gustavo Contreras, president of the Latin American
Agents Association in Los Angeles. "We must help Latino consumers
understand why they need to purchase health insurance for themselves and
their families, especially when they're not sick."

The Los Angeles-based online portal -- which will focus initially on
California, the country's most culturally diverse state -- will connect
consumers to 12 bilingual, bi-cultural agent-partners located throughout
the state. In the near future, the portal will unveil a series of
in-language web pages and additional tools to provide minority consumers
and business owners with general information about health and life
insurance. One Voice Insurance Services agents, who operate successful and
well-known businesses in their communities, will write policies from some
of the country's largest health and life insurance companies including
Aetna, AIG, Blue Cross, Blue Shield, HealthNet, Kaiser Permanente, MetLife
and Prudential Financial, among others.

Agent-partners like Wes Kwon, whose insurance agency has served the Korean
and Korean American communities for more than 25 years, said many
bilingual consumers simply prefer dealing with an agent that speaks their
native tongue. "Even native-born English speakers have a difficult time
understanding the nuances of an insurance policy. By communicating in a
customer's native language, we can develop a trustworthy relationship,
better understand their needs, and explain how insurance will benefit
their families and businesses," Kwon said.

http://prweb.com/printer.php?prid=510927
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