If you've ever been told that you can't buy life insurance due to a pre-existing medical condition or that your application was rated up due to one or more medical conditions, Life Quotes, Inc. offers these tips for securing a life insurance policy at a rate you can live with.
Life insurance shoppers with heart disease, cancer, diabetes and other common ailments, take heart. There are strategies that you can employ to obtain life insurance coverage, often at a great price, but a good outcome requires that you properly shop the market or have a good agent do so for you.
The art of life insurance underwriting is based upon some 80 different rating factors, each of which has to be looked at before an offer is made. So if the website you are visiting only asks a few questions about your health and reveals only "lowball quotes," beware because many more questions will be asked at a later time and, yes, the price will change. A good agent will tell you this upfront and not sugarcoat the truth.
The best that any agent or website can do is show you preliminary quotes (their best estimate of what the final rate will be) based upon their knowledge of the market and what you tell them about your medical history. For this reason, we recommend that you always work with an agent who represents at least 30 insurance companies, and is willing to show you the list of such companies. Life insurance prices vary widely among competing companies, which can add another element of surprise to the process.
Susan Mancione, Sales Director at Life Quotes, Inc., has this advice for life insurance shoppers who have been turned down or rated up: "The first thing you should do is seek the advice of an agent that you trust to guide you through this process. That can make all the difference. Secondly, if you have a ratable health condition, always obtain a recent letter from your doctor and attach it to your application. Make sure that the letter describes your history, current medications and their assessment of your outlook. Attaching this letter at the outset helps reduce uncertainty and gives you, the agent and the life underwriter an accurate picture of your situation."
Once the application is submitted it can take anywhere from 14 to 60 days to complete the entire process, sometimes even longer if your medical records have to be retrieved from numerous doctors.
From there, the life insurance company will closely review the answers you gave to the paramedical examiner. They will also access third party prescription drug databases, check your life insurance activity records at the Medical Information Bureau, or MIB, retrieve your medical records and possibly conduct a separate telephone interview with you.
Mancione continued, "What life underwriters look for most in an applicant with ratable conditions is whether your condition is stable and improving or getting worse. Then they look to see if you are in compliance with your doctor's instructions. Applicants over age 50 should show a history of regular checkups. Many life insurance companies require that a certain period of time pass, such as 1-3 years, from the onset of certain heart disease and cancers."
Heart condition:
Heart disease is the #1 cause of death in America and, as such, is looked at very closely by every life insurer. Although more and more women are being diagnosed with heart conditions, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that between 70 and 89 percent of sudden cardiac events occur in men (as of 2006). A number of factors come into play when life insurers address heart disease, including the type and severity of the disease, as well as the age and documented lifestyle habits of the life insurance applicant.
