You are in good health and you see your doctor regularly,
so what should you do now that you were turned down for
life insurance based on the results of the medical exam?
The first step is not to panic. While it is possible that a
life insurance medical exam can reveal serious health
problems of which you might not have been aware, in many
cases you may be denied insurance or charged higher
premiums simply because the medical underwriter found
something troubling that he or she could not explain from
your medical history.
Medical underwriters specialize in classifying risks, and
when they find something abnormal — high levels of
liver enzymes or blood sugar results that are off the
charts, for example — in many cases they will decline
or postpone a decision rather than make a guess as to the
nature of the problem and the medical risks involved.
"We are in the risk-assessment business, not the diagnosis
business," says Dr. Stephen Zimmerman, chief medical
director for American General Life Cos.
Your Next Steps
First, ask the insurance company for the specific details
of your life insurance application denial. All states have
laws requiring an insurance company to provide the specific
reasons for any declination.
Some states permit the information to be sent directly to
the applicant. In other states, any medically related
reasons must be sent to a physician of your choice. If the
reason you were denied life insurance was lab work done as
part of your application, a copy of the lab work will be
sent to your doctor. If the reason was information
contained in a physician's report, the specific reason, and
possibly a copy of the report from which the information
came, can be sent to a doctor to be reviewed with you.
Once you know why you were denied life insurance, go to
your doctor. You and your doctor should find out if there
is something wrong with your health, and stories abound
about life insurance applications that have saved lives by
alerting the applicants to serious medical problems. Even
if all tests come back negative, you may face some
challenges in buying life insurance in the future unless
the trouble area is cleared up.
You see, insurance companies have access to the results of
your previous insurance exam through the Medical
Information Bureau (MIB), a clearinghouse of medical
information that insurers share, and while you can request
your MIB file and have outright errors removed, the results
of your test, although unfavorable and perhaps unexplained,
may not be wrong.
When you next apply for life insurance, you will probably
need to make an argument to the insurer as to why it should
offer you a policy (or a policy at a better price), even if
you apply to a different insurer. Fortunately this may not
be hard.
Providing the life insurance company with the results of
tests that show you do not have medical conditions
associated with the results of your insurance medical exam
can go a long way toward helping you go from no life
insurance to being able to buy an affordable life insurance
policy.
"The tests you've taken will allow the insurer to exclude
some serious diseases," says Dr. Robert Gleeson, a vice
president and medical underwriter at Northwestern Mutual
Life Insurance Co. "Each negative result on a medical test
would make me feel better and better about underwriting a
case like this."
It is up to you, however, to make sure that the insurer has
that information because even favorable tests can sometimes
slip through the cracks. So be sure that your doctors have
sent all of the relevant tests to the life insurance
company, and that the insurer knows how to contact all of
the doctors who treated you.
You should also make your case to your insurance agent.
Life insurance agents can help you argue for a
better-priced policy and can make sure all of your medical
information gets to the right people.
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Amy Danise is a staff writer for http://insure.com . Visit
http://insure.com for a comprehensive array of comparative
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