How Improved Health Affects Your Life Insurance Rates – Part One
Getting Life Insurance after lowering your blood pressure and cholesterol levels
This article will explore how improved blood pressure and cholesterol levels can lower your life insurance rates. Whether you’re recovering from cancer or a heart attack or have lowered your blood pressure or cholesterol, all improvements (over time) matter to life insurance companies.
Blood Pressure and Cholesterol
Did you know that the cholesterol levels of approximately a quarter of the adult population in this country are higher than normal? And that nearly one in three adults has high blood pressure? However, early detection, changes in diet and/or lifestyle, and continually improving medications make it possible to lower high blood pressure and high cholesterol.
How high is too high? First, we’ll look at blood pressure. Normal adult blood pressure is generally identified as 130 over 85. You are considered hypertensive (hypertension = high blood pressure) if your blood pressure is at or above 140 over 90. A blood pressure level at or slightly above 140 over 90 is regarded as low-grade hypertension, and this alone will usually not raise your life insurance costs. But combined with another underwriting factor (such as cholesterol or obesity), hypertension is likely to raise your costs, and if your blood pressure is dangerously high, this alone may raise your rates.
For cholesterol, most doctors recommend that you keep your cholesterol below 200 (with your LDL, or low density lipoprotein level, below 100). However, a slightly elevated cholesterol level will not generally impact your life insurance costs. If you have severely elevated levels of cholesterol, or have slightly elevated levels combined with another negative underwriting factor (such as blood pressure or weight), your costs may be higher. Or if not higher, these factors are likely to make you ineligible for preferred rates.
As discussed before, many people respond well to medications that help lower their blood pressure and/or cholesterol levels. Also, the low amount of negative side effects associated with these types of medication make life insurers happy. If you have successfully lowered your levels, your past higher levels should not affect your life insurance costs. Be sure to let your insurance company know if you have successfully lowered your blood pressure and/or cholesterol. They may require you to take their own medical tests to verify this information. If you develop high levels of either after you have already locked in your rates, your insurance company cannot raise your rates. And similarly, if your medications are working and you’ve lowered your levels, this will usually not mean that you are charged higher rates when you are applying for a new life insurance policy (which might make it a good time to shop around for a new policy if your current insurer doesn’t lower your rates significantly after you’ve successfully proven lower levels). Be sure to compare rates at InsWeb in any of these cases, as they can differ significantly from company to company.
Conclusion
All in all, lowering your high blood pressure or cholesterol can significantly lower your life insurance rates. For example, rates at InsWeb indicate that a healthy 30 year old female with normal blood pressure and cholesterol levels could save approximately $50 a month on a 30-year $500,000 term life insurance policy over her counterpart with high levels of both. Be sure to keep checking at InsWeb to see how low your rates can be!
