Posts filed under 'asthma'
Guilty as charged. I am one of those recovering saltaholics that grabs the salt shaker and tops off a meal before I’ve even taken a bite to see if it needs it. I love salt and although I am getting better about at least giving something a taste first, the truth is, well, I’m still recovering and fall off the wagon occasionally.
A high salt/low potassium diet is a pretty reliable ticket to the land of high blood pressure, stroke and some types of asthma. A topic of considerable attention lately has been the unbelievable amounts of sodium found in some of the most popular dishes in some of the most popular restaurants most of go to at least occasionally. Sometimes it seems to me that restaurants offerings are kind of self defeating. They make meals taste good by adding large amounts of salt and it often tastes so good that people are driven to eat every last bite, which unchecked leads to obesity.
Now perspective is a good thing. No reason to freak out if there really isn’t a reason, right? They (whoever they are) say that the maximum sodium intake for an adult should be about one teaspoon daily. I am an admitted saltaholic and if I were presented with a salt free day’s worth of meals, I doubt that I would add an entire teaspoon over the course of a day. That’s a lot of salt!
My downfall comes when I eat dinner out at a restaurant that knows two things for sure. 1. We, as a nation, love salt and want it on most everything we eat and 2. The more salt we eat the more beverages we tend to drink. Chili’s restaurants are one of the most consistent abusers of sodium out there. That one teaspoon is roughly equal to 2300 mg. Just a few of Chili’s sodium busting treats are their boneless buffalo chicken salad which sounds healthy but has 4400 mg of sodium, about twice what you should take in on a daily basis. Then there is their Southern Smokehouse Bacon Big Mouth Burger which tops the sodium scale at 4150 mg.
PF Changs has proven to be the king of salt. Their Hot and Sour Soup Bowl tips the scales at an amazing 6878 mg. 3 times the daily recommended maximum in one bowl of soup. I’m wondering if that soup really, really tastes bad and they hope that enough salt will cover it up.
Given the kind of abuse your body goes through at these restaurants, it’s a wonder that life insurance applications don’t ask where and how often you eat meals out. While hypertension and even a stroke can be underwritten at good rates, if a person is hanging out at the who’s who of salty foods, they have to present a higher mortality risk than those who actually monitor their salt intake at almost any level.
Bottom line. Eating right is simply not part of the American way of life and our habit of ignoring how food is prepared, especially the salt and fat that is used, is a recipe for obesity, type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure and stroke. It may be time to ask for sodium confessions before we order a meal.
May 18th, 2009
It’s just a bad feeling when a life insurance company declines to offer you coverage. They don’t want to accept the mortality risk!! Do they think you’re dying? Is there something your doctor isn’t telling you? Will you ever be able to get life insurance, or are you black balled now?
I can’t tell you how many inquiries come through our website that start, “I’ve been declined by XYZ company due to whatever”. That person’s thinking is that they may never be able to get life insurance for their family’s protection. My thinking is that this is a good place to start! We know who declined the person and we know why so the mission is pretty simple. We need to find a company that doesn’t share the same underwriting philosophy, or figure out if the case was just presented poorly and needs a more complete presentation to put an underwriter at ease.
Supposedly there are about 2000 companies that write life insurance. For many it is just a product they have because they wouldn’t want to miss any chance to make money from you. You certainly don’t think life insurance when you hear State Farm, Farmers or Farm Bureau, but they are licensed to sell life insurance. The only problem is they really don’t care if they do and for that reason their underwriting is definitely anti-approval unless you’re in perfect health and even then their prices stink.
That thought aside, for a minute let’s just assume there was a way to apply with all of the companies at once, all 2000. If you had well controlled high blood pressure you might be approved by
most of the companies, but once you got past the top 100 you would find the rates rather unattractive. If you had a history of asthma I suspect you might be declined by 25% of those companies and the rates after the top 50 would be rather painful to look at.
If you had well controlled type 2 diabetes with no other risk factors I suspect you might get 50-100 approvals and the 10 best rates would be the only rates that didn’t grab your gag reflex and get it going. If you had a history of a low stage and grade prostate cancer you might get 20 approvals and 2 or 3 of those might have a price worth considering. If you have very well controlled bipolar disorder
you might get 5-10 approvals and 2 of those might be workable.
All companies have drawn a line in the sand on just about every health issue you can imagine. That is the bad news. The good news is that for almost any health issue you can imagine there are companies, albeit only a few in some cases, that understand it and as long as treatment is successful, are willing to accept it as a risk.
So why do I consider a decline as a good starting point? Consider the numbers I just presented and consider the odds that your decline came from the wrong company. Declines very often have almost nothing to do with you and almost everything to do with a particular company’s underwriting philosophy.
Bottom line. The chances of turning a decline into an approval are actually very good if you have a knowledgeable independent agent working on your behalf. Don’t take no for an answer.
March 30th, 2009
I went off a bit on some of the more ridiculous combinations with smoking the other day. Smoking and asthma. Smoking and heart disease, etc. Some guy (blog name Joe Camel (clever)), took some hard swings at the life insurance industry for being so mean to smokers. Fortunately for me smokers run out of breath quick and the hard swings turn to frail flailing.
So let me throw a little different spin on this subject and see if makes the point. 120,000 people a year die from COPD (chronic obstructive pulmonary disease), almost all of them smokers. COPD is the number four killer in the US behind heart disease, cancer and strokes.
The American Lung Association shared some interesting facts about the little talked about COPD.
It seems that COPD is another one of those silent killers, not unlike high blood pressure or hypertension. Often the symptoms are shrugged off as natural consequences of smoking or lifestyle. Things like smoker’s cough, or just feeling your age or feeling out of shape. The longer they are shrugged off, the more damage your lungs suffer.
Bottom line. Whether you agree with life insurance companies and their underwriting guidelines around smoking, do the right thing. My wife and I recently vacationed in Mexico and in the duty free shop at the airport they were selling huge boxes of cigarettes. I think each box must have held 10 cartons or something. On the top was the brand name of the cigarette and on the side, in huge letters that covered the whole side of the box, it said SMOKING KILLS! Sounds like someone down there understands the statistics.
May 22nd, 2008
A perfectly healthy person who smokes can expect to pay, best case, twice as much as a person who doesn’t smoke for life insurance. I’ve been on that soap box often enough that I don’t know that I need to beat it to death anymore.
With that being said, there are other times when smoking can have an even more profound impact on underwriting. An underwriter I know and work with on a regular basis calls the extra premium or sometimes the decline that results from smoking in addition to certain health issues as a “you just can’t fix stupid tax”.
We’ll start with the flagrant examples and work our way back toward some of the more subtle. By the way, all of these examples are from people who have actually called me attempting to get life insurance. A person who has diagnosed COPD (chronic obstructive pulmonary disease) and still smokes has apparently missed something somewhere and is a slam dunk decline.
A person with an otherwise insurable history of cancer, if they smoke, would either suffer a much higher rating or be declined because they haven’t quite grasped the fact that there is a direct correlation between abusing your body and bad things happening.
One that comes up fairly frequently is the person who has suffered a heart attack or been diagnosed with CAD (coronary artery disease) and still smokes. Hellooo!!!! The doctor said you need to quit. Your wife said you need to quit. The surgeon general said you need to quit. Your mother is going to outlive you because you refuse to get a grip and do the right thing.
Asthma and smoking. Depending on the severity of the asthma, this can be reasonably insurable to highly rated. It’s frankly never made a lot of sense to me. If you have trouble just breathing air, why would you substitute smoke for air? Kind of like if you had trouble swallowing water, substituting mud.
Bottom line. Life insurance underwriting allows for insuring smokers in most cases. Higher rates will always apply when comparing smokers to non smokers. I’ve never been shy about ripping the heads off underwriters when I think they’ve got it wrong. When it comes to smoking combined with smoking caused or exacerbated health issues, I believe they’re right on target.
May 15th, 2008
I had a call earlier today from a long time friend that is going to be coming through. Bob has asthma and quizzed me about whether we still had cats or not. More than once he has decided not to stay the night because cats and his asthma just don’t mix.
Now Bob knows I’m a life insurance agent and he knows I’m a bit of a brutal blogger on some subjects, so I am armed with a new study that shows that if my friend would just lose some weight, cats and asthma would likely be less of an issue.
This fairly large study showed that BMI 30 obesity level folks were 66% more likely to have asthma symptoms on a consistent basis than even those who were just considered overweight, BMI 25-29. Bob has always floated between those two categories depending on his level of exercise.
I have another out for my cats though. Bob and I inevitably share several good laughs when we get together, sharing stories and comparing notes on whose kids can mess up better than the other’s. I also found a study about laughter induced asthma. According to this study LIA (yes, they gave it an acronym) is as common or more common than most allergy induced asthma.
From a life insurance standpoint asthma has to meet the same thresholds as many other health issues. The biggest of these are compliance and control. If a person takes the situation seriously and complies with medical direction, the asthma will be well controlled and therefore pose less of a health threat.
Bottom line. Bob is a friend among friends. One of those guys that is always there for you. I hope my advice that he lose the weight once and for all and stop laughing isn’t taken wrong.
May 6th, 2008
