Don’t Believe In Regular Checkups? Are You Going To Buy Your Life Insurance From The Tooth Fairy?

Guys, we’ve talked about this before, an area where women don’t even have to struggle at all to make us look like morons. Unfortunately far too many men find out the value of an annual physical, a regular checkup, when they discover that they have a serious health issue that might have been avoided or at least discovered earlier if they had a relationship with their primary care doctor.

I don’t have to search far to find the truth in this. In just the last 10 years, the number of men who have applied for life insurance through me only to get declined because of medical information they should have known has been, well, larger than most men would guess. The medical exam and lab tests that come with applying for life insurance are quite often the first thorough workup men have had in years. To their dismay it often answers the question about why they haven’t been feeling up to par lately.

All of these things are simple and relatively inexpensive to test for when you consider the high expense of treating the aftermath when things get out of control. Probably the most common thing that pops up is high cholesterol, a leading cause of heart disease. Caught early, minor lifestyle changes can usually turn the problem around. When the problem is discovered after things are out of control, it is often a far more serious matter.

Diabetes is a fairly common discovery on insurance exams. Again, any kind of regular checkup would have revealed a level of pre diabetes that could have been treated with lifestyle changes. It is not an unusual occurrence for men to discover that they have prostate cancer due to an elevated PSA on their insurance exam.

One issue that pops up with regularity that doesn’t even require an exam is the discovery that both men and women find out that they weigh significantly more than they thought they did.

All of that is to say that having regular visits to your doctor, for obvious reasons, is something that insurance companies like to see. It is safe to say that the majority of life insurance companies, if you are over age 50, would prefer not to even consider your application if you haven’t seen the doctor in the last 2 years. There is only one company I know of who will consider your application under those conditions if you are over 60.

Bottom line. Guys would prefer not to see doctors unless they are dying. This really presents a poor risk to insurance companies. Since insurance companies aren’t likely to change, men, maybe we should consider conceding to women that they are right on this issue.