Friday, 18 October 2013

Diabetes & The Impact On Life Insurance

Diabetes & The Impact On Life Insurance

Editor's note: A guest article by LifeBroker, Australia’s largest specialist insurance broker

If you are suffering from the symptoms of diabetes, you may be concerned about whether or not you will qualify for life insurance. Thankfully, in almost all circumstances the answer is yes. This is true regardless of whether or not you have Type 1 or Type 2 diabetes.

 Diabetes is an issue that has been growing more prevalent. More people are diagnosed with this disease now than ever before. The life insurance companies are already well aware of this fact, and they are always revising their guidelines in order to account for the increasing occurrence of the disease.

By 2031, statistics indicate that as much as 11 percent of the Australian population could be suffering from type 2 diabetes. This will amount to about 3.3 million Australians!

When you apply for life insurance, you will need to undergo medical screening. In other words, you will be asked a series of questions about your health. Your answers to these questions will then be assessed by an underwriter. It is their job to make a prediction about how likely it is that you will need to make a claim within a certain period of time. In cases where you have a disease like diabetes, the risks that you will need to file a claim sooner become higher.

When applying for life insurance, it is best to get the underwriting up front. What this means is that you will be fully informed of the terms of the policy before you agree to anything. It is important to be completely sure of everything that you will and will not be covered for, before any agreements have been made.

When a policy is underwritten at the time of the claim, rather than up front, this means that you might not be covered even after paying your premiums for many years.

Before allowing you to sign up for a policy, most life insurance companies will require further testing, even in cases where you have no pre-existing condition such as diabetes. In the case of somebody who has diabetes, they may ask for several pieces of information. This could include your blood pressure, age, age of diagnosis, the type of diabetes, medications, weight and height, your ECG levels, and a recent HBA1C test result. They may also want to test to make sure there is no protein in your urine.

The purpose of this information is to determine how well you are controlling your diabetes, which is the primary factor in determining whether or not you qualify.




Insurance: A Guide

"Remember kids, I have life insurance" - Adam Savage

This is a guest article from Tatyana Levin

These days one must be financially savvy. Money is not easy to come by and should be managed carefully. With the availability of tools that make it easy to keep track of current events, the stock market, and even your own money, it would be almost a crime to not utilize these tools to make the best and most informed financial decisions. Unfortunately, the more there is, the more there is to keep track of. This applies both to tracking tools and money (the small curse within the comfort of having money to keep track of).

 The savvier ones of us dabble in investments, and the savviest make their living that way. The key is that they know what to invest in. Not magically, of course; investors do a significant amount of research to learn how to optimize their portfolios, but they have the understanding.

A grossly overlooked investment is insurance. This may be because is not typically referred to as an investment with the exception of whole life insurance that has a specific investment component within it. Webster’s defines the word “invest” as a commitment of money for a return and “insurance” as a guarantee. This makes insurance the safest type of investment, because your returns are guaranteed.  But returns are not always financial in the case of insurance. They can be, if there is an unforeseen accident, but the most certain return is the feeling of security.

Now there are many different types of insurance, and what you need depends on your current situation. Obviously you only need auto insurance, found using auto insurance leads if you have a car, and you only need renter’s insurance if you rent and have possessions that you would need insured. Insurance is for those who have something to lose. With an attachment to something, either emotional of physical (or dependence, not like physically being glued to your car), comes the fear that it will be damaged or ruined in some way. For example, if your house caught on fire, you would be devastated. What would add insult to injury is not having a way to recover from this horrible disaster.

 These types of examples are not unique to this article. That is the way that insurance is sold. As they say that clichés are clichés for a reason, insurance is promoted this way for a reason.  The foundation of the concept of insurance is uncertainty, and it is the same uncertainty that is conjured up when investing.

The main difference between insurance and investment is that not having insurance creates a feeling of uncertainty while investments by nature are uncertain. Therefore, investing in insurance creates security and is the only secure investment that exists (and is legal). Getting insurance should be one of the easier financial tasks if you apply all the resources available with technological advances like smart phones.

About the Author: This article was written by Tatyana Levin, a copywriter for InsuranceFiles.com

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