The life insurance quotes we provide are always subject to “complete medical underwriting” which includes an examination (labs and physical exam) and a review or your medical records. One of the larger bones of contention when it comes to underwriting is lab results that either don’t match up with your perception of how healthy you are, [...]

I was talking to a friend yesterday who, like many of us, is trying to compute how many additional years he will have to work to make up for the money he has lost from his assets over this past month. He calculated that he would have to work an additional 1.5 years to make [...]

If you talk to most life insurance applicants who fall into the obese or morbidly obese categories according the their BMI, they have usually been told that they aren’t insurable or that the prices are so high as to render uninsurable because they can’t afford it. Let’s not dance around the subject. Life insurance underwriting is [...]

Talk about a topic that has changed with the wind over the years, diabetes underwriting would be that animal. There was a time not all that long ago, at least if you’re my age, that diabetes was treated by most companies with a swift decline and by the few that would entertain it, with extreme [...]

Where the heck did my net worth go? This has been one tough month on those of us who are actually middle class enough to care what happens to our retirement investments. For many it is a scramble to get your money to a safe place, with people scrambling to move money to T bills [...]

Preventive medicine has been around for a long time. In most cases that takes the shape of being on medication for borderline cholesterol or blood pressure issues. In some cases where women have a better than average chance of having breast cancer, radical mastectomy is considered to be not just a cancer treatment, but preventive [...]

Well, duh! Of course you do, but the good news is that you don’t have to be breathing all the time. After all, sleep apnea could be loosely described as periods of not breathing during sleep. Sleep apnea is one of those health issues that life insurance underwriters, from company to company, vary wildly on. Some [...]

This is mostly a rhetorical life insurance quiz for guys. There are no guarantees that you will be approved for life insurance at all, although most are. And there certainly aren’t any guarantees that you be approved at the rate class you applied for. All of us, except me, really want and kind of expect [...]

A few years ago I wrote about my Dad’s diagnosis with bladder cancer, a serious stage 4 cancer. In the words of the oncologist, an aggressive and dangerous cancer. What I didn’t share at that time was the fact that his family doctor had treated symptoms as if he had a bladder infection for months. Round [...]

If anything, I hope I’ve driven home the point over the years that life insurance underwriters look at any health issue not just from a pure mortality standpoint, but from a compliance and control point of view. If you look at the overall bucket of potential insureds, some of the old school underwriters will still [...]