If Obesity Hasn’t Damaged You, It Should’t Hurt Life Insurance Chances!

Let’s don’t mince words on this subject. If someone is 40% overweight they are twice as likely to die prematurely than someone of average build. It’s not the fat that kills you, but the strain that all that extra weight puts on your body making you a prime target for obesity caused health risks.

The point I want to drive home and the key to reasonable life insurance rates for the overweight is to consider the insurance before any other health issues show up. Weight by itself can increase your life insurance rates, but not to the extent that weight plus diabetes or weight plus heart disease or weight plus cancer will.

A good example of this is a client just recently, who at 6’3″ and 325#, was able to get a standard rate through Prudential because all of the risk factors were excellent. He had blood pressure and cholesterol numbers that anyone would love to stuff in their medical records. His glucose was 87 on the exam. We talked at length and he recognized that he had a need for life insurance and that there was simply not a better time. He knew that because of his weight, his long term health could be an issue.

I was recently contacted by a man who had undergone gastric bypass surgery several years ago and had been told that, because of that surgery, he was uninsurable. Gastric bypass carries less of a stigma than it used to. It used to be looked at as kind of a lazy man’s diet, and a dangerous one at that. But more recent studies have shown that the reward of the drastic action may in fact trump the risks of whittling away at weight a few pounds at a time. The person who contacted me ultimately got a standard plus offer from Banner Life insurance, a classic case of having contacted the wrong agent who applied with the wrong insurance company the first time around.

Bottom line. It won’t cost you anything to find out what life insurance would cost you right now, but the cost of waiting could be the addition of health complications.