Holy Triglycerides Batman! Who Was That Masked Lipid?

I recently shared about an insurance applicant who was approved by Transamerica at table 4 due to some admirably huge lipid readings. His Trigs were 862, total cholesterol 348 and HDL/total ratio 9.25.
I encouraged him to take those results directly to his doctor.

I told him the first thing he would get is a retest. No doctor would take those results at face value and start treating. I told him in the interim I would shop the numbers and see, in case he did need to start treatment, if we could lock in a lower rate for the coverage he wanted that would work until his lipid profile was back in the normal range. I also told him that if those readings were confirmed by his doctor he should take the Transamerica offer at least for a few month until we could replace it with something more humane to his checking account.

Within a few days he had donated blood to his doctor and I had found a few companies that were willing to offer much better rates based on those lipids. We were ready and covered any way it played out. I just got an email from him today with his new labs from his doctor. Taken two weeks after the insurance labs with no treatment in the interim the new labs had his triglycerides at 127, his total cholesterol at 190 and his ratio at 4.0. So what happened? Even if he had taken massive doses of IV statins the numbers couldn’t have changed that much in two weeks.

So, what do you do with two completely different sets of labs? Do you throw out the bad and believe in the new? Believe it or not, if he presented those new labs to Transamerica they might lean toward averaging the two sets of labs which would still result in a highly rated policy. I have now shopped this out again with both sets of labs to see what company will throw out the first set for us. The man is in preferred plus cardiac health and shouldn’t be treated any other way.

Bottom line. If you have an insurance exam that results in absurdly out of range results, do take them to your doctor right away. The most important thing is to find out as quickly as possible if you are absurdly sick. If the new labs, as above, appear to have come from different planets, don’t go back to the same company unless they are willing to throw out the high results. The truth is that labs done in a doctor’s office have a considerably lower incidence of inaccuracy than those done by an examiner at your home. If you have any questions or have had an insurance company average good news with bad news, call or email me directly. Let’s talk.