What You Need to Know About The Life Insurance Medical Exam

Purchasing a good life insurance policy requires you to submit to a health exam by a licensed medical professional. Insurance companies need this because they want to know how much risk they are assuming by writing a policy on your life.

Regardless of the insurance company, the exam is pretty standard. Here’s what you should keep in mind before the exam.

• You’ll probably do a phone interview before the exam begins. During the interview, the examiner will ask for your height, weight, and other measurements. Tell the truth, if you say you’re 150 pounds, and the examiner arrives to see you are over 200 pounds, they will be skeptical of your responses to other questions.
• Before going to the examine, get good sleep and try to relax. There is nothing to be scared about and most exams don’t last longer than an hour.
• Don’t drink caffeine, soda, or take any other stimulants before your exam. These can raise your heart rate and blood pressure, giving the examiner an incorrect reading. For the same reason, don’t go to the gym or engage in strenuous activity before the exam. Exercise or hard work can raise your blood pressure for several hours. Take the exam on a rest day, or a day you don’t have chores to do.
• Drink some water before the exam so you can provide a urine sample.

What about life insurance, smoking, and weight loss?
If you are a smoker, tell the examiner. Chances are they will see outward signs anyway, and you want to be as forthcoming and truthful as possible.

The same goes for weight loss. If you are trying to lose weight tell the examiner. However, your life insurance company won’t recognize your weight loss or the fact you quit smoking until you have at least a year of stable weight or of being a non-smoker.

Do you need to take a medical exam?
Not necessarily, there are insurance policies that allow people to skip the medical exam. However, there’s a cost. Most of those policies are more expensive and don’t offer the same level of coverage. This doesn’t mean you should ignore these policies. They might benefit people with pre-existing health conditions, or who don’t want to take the time for an exam.

Honesty Is The Best Policy
If you purposely fail to disclose information about your health condition, the policy can be canceled, or the insurance company might contest paying out the full benefit. This would be an awful position for your survivors to be in as they are coping with the loss of a loved one.

Life insurance is one of the more complicated forms of protection. There are a lot of nuanced aspects to the policies. At Flagler Financial, we are experts in life insurance, and we help people negotiate the health exam and other elements of the policy. If you are considering purchasing any form of insurance, we invite you to contact us for a consultation.