Let’s step through the process of applying for life insurance with pre-existing health conditions. We can’t be specific because there’s so many different conditions, but we can advise you on the general steps you should take.

 First however, some general comments. It’s our experience that consumers are REALLY bad at determining what will impact their life insurance application. Conditions you think are serious, often are not. And conditions you may think have no impact, can actually end up denying your coverage. It’s very non-intuitive.

Things you think are important, but may not be:

There’s a lot of fairly common conditions (anxiety/depression, cholesterol, HBP, even diabetes – and even, in some cases, cancer) where consumers think it will be a concern for the life insurance company. In practice, many of these conditions are no longer life threatening – if they are monitored, medicated, stable, and under control. And if all of that’s the case, the life insurance companies will investigate, review, and then often dismiss it as mattering for the insurance application.

Things you think don’t matter, but can:

There’s a lot of fairly common conditions (anxiety/depression, cholesterol, HBP, even diabetes – and even, in some cases, cancer) where consumers think it will be a concern for the life insurance company. In practice, many of these conditions are no longer life threatening – if they are monitored, medicated, stable, and under control. And if all of that’s the case, the life insurance companies will investigate, review, and then often dismiss it as mattering for the insurance application.

How to approach this

 Experience of your life insurance agent is going to drive how you move forward to ensure your life insurance premiums are as low as they can be. So first step if you have a condition you think might impact your life insurance application, is to speak to your agent.

They may tell you that the condition is not likely to be a factor – that you’ll receive standard life insurance premiums (or as we like to say, everybody has something – this condition is just what you have. And they still sell lots of life insurance to regular people). This happens more often than you may expect – conditions consumers think are a problem, aren’t.

If it will impact your premiums, the agent may have a judgement call on what the premiums bay change to as a percentage of standard premiums. If that’s the case, you’ll have to determine if you’re prepared to move ahead at those quoted premiums.

If the agent is not able to estimate, then the next step is to ask the agent to speak to an underwriter and get an estimate from the underwriter. This is difficult to do these days, as many companies don’t offer this service anymore – so only some agents can get this, with some companies.

Next, some companies are cheaper than other companies for the same condition. i.e. companies use height-weight charts so it's important that your broker have experience with this.