Lead, Follow or Tell Your Clients the Truth!!

I think I’ve mentioned before that there is a real propensity in the life insurance business for agents to be so protective of a potential sale that they will actually tell a customer they are uninsurable, rather than admit they are the wrong agent for the job.

There isn’t a week that goes by without hearing from people who are desperate to find affordable life insurance. They have been told they are uninsurable because they had a heart attack. They’ve been told they will never get insurance because they’ve had breast cancer or because they are type 2 diabetic. I’ve had clients who are never called back by another agent because they admitted they had been through alcohol treatment.

Agents actually tell these people “you will never get life insurance”. In the whole scheme of things I get to talk to only a handful of these abused people. I can only imagine how many just give up and leave their family without protection because some lame excuse for a life insurance agent didn’t have the guts to just tell their client to seek out a more experienced independent agent.

I’ve always said that if you talk to an agent and they declare you uninsurable without running your information informally through several underwriters, they are either captive or incompetent. If they say they’ve shopped it and you are simply uninsurable and they don’t talk to you about guaranteed issue life insurance, they are captive or incompetent.

The bottom line is that agents very often declare you uninsurable because they aren’t knowledgable in your impairment or are too lazy to work an impaired risk case. No one said it’s easy, but quoting Rich Fuller from Special Risk Services, an impaired risk general agent for 30 years, “Anyone can write insurance on the super healthy, but the reward is placing much needed insurance for someone who has suffered severe health problems”.

Never, never take uninsurable as an answer without doing an internet search for an agent with the expertise you need.

This post is somewhat dated. Life insurance underwriting is changing and evolving continually. For more updated information check out some of the key word links. If you have a specific question or topic you need information for do a search. If you don’t find the answers you need contact me and we’ll make sure you get the information that is important to you.