I got this email just recently:

Hi Mr. Hinerman:

I have been reading your blog for some time. Just curious, why do I never see MetLife, my company, among your quotes? If you haven’t checked us out in a while you might want to try. Our rating guide for CAD has recently been updated and we might be able to offer on a guy like the one you posted about today (depending on his age and cath report details, of course.)

Thanks, and please keep this confidential.

Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, MD
AVP, Medical Director, MetLife

Well, here’s the deal. I don’t have a lot of experience with Met Life, but they did come through on a trial for a client of mine as the best game in town. On my recommendation we applied with Met.

My client has a form of epilepsy called tuberous sclerosis and seizure. He was diagnosed at age 15. Most of his seizures have been nocturnal and, well, I presented all of this in an email asking for trial offers. Met Life came back with a Table 4 offer and while record acquisition has been the major time eater, early on in the underwriting process our case underwriter (different person than trial underwriter), let us know that she didn’t agree with the trial offer and thought it should be a decline.

That’s a real problem. On the one hand I have an underwriter that reads the trial, does the homework and comes up with a table 4 offer. Based on the table 4 we put together an application for a policy that worked within my client’s budget and applied. Then it ends up in the hands of an underwriter who lets us know up front that she is likely to decline the case even if it comes back no worse than our trial presentation. But, she says let’s move ahead and get 5 years records.

That took a while (two months), but we got them. Now the underwriter wants to go after some additional records (more than 5 years ago). I definitely do not get the feeling that the underwriter wants more information in order to empower the approval. I definitely get the feeling that she is looking for more meat to decline the client.

So, Blah, blah, MD, you want more presence in my blog?

Bottom line. You got it.