Archive for April 15th, 2009
I’ve written plenty about the road that someone with diabetes has to deal with in getting life insurance, but for just a few minutes I’d like to step out of my life insurance shoes for a minute and talk about the critical issue of those who don’t have or don’t have enough health insurance.
Diabetes is a costly disease to deal with when you factor in the testing materials, drugs and regular MD visits. I read an article today that underscored the impact of this recession and the imperative need to find some way to make health care available to those who can’t afford it. The fact that really drove home what is happening is the fact that while 1.3 million more people were diagnosed with diabetes during the last year, sales of diabetes medications dropped. People are going without treatment and medical followup.
I don’t know any sensitive or gentle way to put this, and believe me this is not aimed at those suffering financially, but not treating or under treating diabetes is a slow, painful death sentence. As your treatment wanes and your glucose levels rise your body begins to succumb to the collateral health issues that have been held at bay. Heart disease and kidney failure become immediate concerns. Neuropathy and retinopathy can take hold quickly when glucose control goes out the window. Diabetes is simply not something that you can let slide for a while.
Bottom line. In my quest to help people understand the implications of good or poor control of diabetes and what that means for life insurance, and for their life, I haven’t been as in tune as I should have with what the cost of maintaining that control can be.
April 15th, 2009
I have spent the last few weeks highly encouraging fence sitting customers to make a move if they truly want the deal of the century on term life insurance. While Prudential’s 4-5% increase in term insurance rates will still keep them competitive, when you consider paying that higher premium for 20 or 30 years, well, it would kind of suck to look back at the opportunity lost.
Prudential is just the most recent in a string of companies that have changed their no lapse guarantee universal life and term insurance rates. I screamed as loud as I could and as often as I could when I saw it coming back at the first of the year. Many have acted and locked in historically low rates. Others are apparently not seeing the logic of saving money during a recession.
What’s been happening since the first of the year isn’t just one of those ho-hum, another rate increase, kind of thing. While the price of everything has been going up for the past 15 years, the cost of life insurance has been going quite steadily down. These aren’t just “another rate increase”, but rather the first rate increase in more than a decade amongst the term insurance leaders who have been battling lower and lower.
What’s behind the turnaround? For many companies it is just a conservative move to make sure reserves remain strong, especially in their longer term products and external guarantee universal life products. For others, companies hit by rating changes, it is actually a mandated increase in reserves due to their downgrade in financial ratings.
Whatever the reason and whatever your position, if you are considering adding term insurance or permanent insurance to your portfolio, or would like to replace high priced whole life or volatile variable universal life with a better permanent product, now is the time to buy at prices that will never be seen again and the best guarantees in the industry.
Bottom line. We’re still looking at the tip of the iceberg with Prudential’s term rate increase. I’m thinking you want to have the job done before we see what’s still coming.
April 15th, 2009
I’ve certainly questioned the IQ of more than one life insurance underwriter over the years. I may have even insinuated that a few didn’t even make into on to the IQ scale.
But the truth is there are two types of underwriters working on life insurance applications for us. The first, a group we try to avoid, have an underwriting manual in front of them at all times and if they are God fearing Christians, that manual is second in importance only to the Bible. The guidelines in their manual are followed faithfully and without question. If someone has bipolar disorder and the manual says to decline them, there is no room for looking at it from another direction or all directions, it is still a decline.
If two women had a localized breast cancer and one treated the cancer very aggressively, say with a double mastectomy, chemo and radiation, while the other decided that she would do the minimum acceptable treatment, the manual treats them exactly the same. There is no room for the fact that one method has a much higher survival rate than the other. It’s not broken down that way in the manual.
The second group of underwriters believe that the black and white manual provides guidelines and not rules and that since they are guidelines, there must be room to consider extenuating circumstances. These are the underwriters we seek out when we shop cases. These are the underwriters that give people hope that there is in fact intelligent life inside the walls of insurance companies.
It is this unique group that understands what to look for and what questions to ask in order to determine if someone with bipolar disorder is a poor risk, or as in the case of many, a completely acceptable risk. It is this group that understands that obesity in the absence of risk factors doesn’t present the same mortality risk as someone who is overweight and has coronary artery disease. It is this group that we look to for a sane review of a case involving sleep apnea, situational depression or family history. It is this group that sees beyond the health problem and factors in how a person is handling that problem, not inside the manual but in real life.
Bottom line. If you have an independent life insurance agent who has been around long enough to figure out underwriters to go to and underwriters to run from, you have found the path of least resistance and the path to success.
April 15th, 2009
