Rick Mortimer

Rick Mortimer is an aging Baby Boomer living

in the beautiful foothills of the North Carolina

Piedmont. When he hit the 65-year mark, he began

his personal journey through the maze of everything

Medicare. He was dismayed by the complexity of the

decisions that had to be made, the lack of available

strategies for making them, and the convolutions of the

system in place to provide this vital set of services to

then over 60 million Americans

.

First licensed to sell life & health

insurance in the mid 1980s, and working as a trust advisor for

many years, he knew his way around the industry and

the terminology very well. Even with this background,

he found the process so daunting and confusing

that he decided to come out of years of medically

induced retirement and get re-licensed, so that he

could help others facing the wall of questions that

Medicare generates.

Coming from a career centered on serial entrepreneurship,

this move quickly led to the founding of Next Mountain Advisors

Inc., a firm established to help fellow seniors navigate the

changing requirements of living with an aging body, and a fixed

or declining set of resources. In its first year, the firm

hired and trained agents in several states, ranging from

New Jersey to California, and Michigan to Texas.

These new agents were reliant on the Walmart retail

program for new clients, which turned out to be

short-lived and disappointing, resulting in the agency

losing many of the new recruits. It is a tough business

to get started in.

His health has been a continuing challenge, giving

him a too-close inside look at our healthcare system. In

addition to CHF, Parkinson's, Meniere's, and a nasty

essential tremor, a second round of cancer, this time

pancreatic, set the stage for an early end to his writing

career. Fortunately, an abscess from a prior gall bladder

removal caused a set of imaging that found the tumor

early, so, minus two thirds of his pancreas and his

spleen, he is still upright and taking nourishment.

He feels a special calling to use whatever time he has

left to advocate for his clients and his readers, to help

them find a safe and optimum path through this maze

of rules and nonsense the government has created and

made us all walk through.