4
Feb

Life insurance and diabetes

   Posted by: Rachel Thursby   in Diabetes

Add Comment

I’ve always known that I needed to be on top of my health insurance.  I knew that with Tristan’s condition, it was extremely important that there were no lack in insurance coverage or we could face acceptance problems later.  The whole “Pre-Existing” condition clause!  So that is stressful enough on it’s own.

Yesterday, I came upon this article.  It talks about life insurance on your children.  How no parent wants to think about that but certain circumstances, we would actually be doing our children a favor.  And it goes on to list a few “conditions” that would make getting life insurance near impossible… if not impossible.  On the list….. drum roll please…… DIABETES!

My head did a double take.  This is new to me.  I had never even thought of this.  I’m actually waiting to hear from my insurance agent to see if this article is accurate or not.  If it is, I swear I’m going to scream.  Honestly, this should be important information given as soon as a person is diagnosed with this condition.  They should say something along the lines of “Oh by the way, you’ve just been diagnosed with an incurable disease that, if not managed, can kill you but the good news is that you don’t have to worry about life insurance premium….. you will never qualify.  Ha ha, joke’s on you!!”

If you know the answer to this please share it with us.  Once I get a definite answer from my insurance agent, I will edit this post to reflex the answer.

Thank you Diabetes for yet another headache.

UPDATE!

Well today I received the answer from my insurance agent.  See below.

We would not approve a policy for a 5 year old with diabetes.  We can consider after age 20.  Child Protection Rider would not be accepted either since it is greater than a Table 4 risk.

It looks like when they reach the age of 20 it becomes more likely to get life insurance.

Honestly, how sad is that?  Thanks to Jill at Diabetes Sweeties I had a pretty good idea of the answer but still.  And now I wonder, what’s the difference with a 5 year old diabetic and a 20 year old diabetic?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 4th, 2009 at 4:06 pm and is filed under Diabetes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

2 comments so far

Jill
 1 

You know, it’s funny that you posted this. I just met with our insurance agent a few weeks ago because it had been 8 years since we last reviewed our insurance. So while he was going over things, Kacey said “Mommy, I feel low!” I stopped and managed her and then he says to me… “Does she have diabetes?” ….Ummmmm DUH! LOL No, she likes to stick her finger and draw blood just to see what color it is! (Heres your sign!) Haha! Anyway…he went on to tell me that I should NEVER let her policy lapse because she would NEVER get coverage. ***shocked look*** So I asked him if she could increase her coverage later if she wanted and he said she could but it would cost her MUCH more. We have a $50,000 policy on her already and so that will be more than enough for her now and possibly years to come. But it sucks that because you have an illness like this that you can’t even be covered! Thankfully the coverage we have will never increase for her…but we took the policy out on her when she was only 6 months old. So it was long before diagnosis. How about the Gerber Grow Up Plan? Do you know if they have the same clause?

February 4th, 2009 at 9:48 pm
Jill
 2 

Personally, I’d think a 20yr old diabetic was more of a risk than a 5yr old! But thats my opinion LOL! As they get older the complications are possible and you’d think the insurance company would look at it like that. What a shame!

I’d still try that Gerber plan and see what they say? We don’t have insurance though them but alot of my friends do and it’s a simple $10,000 policy. At least with something like that, if something God forbid, did happen, then you had enough insurance to not bear the financial burden of funeral expenses. Its sad we have to think that way! But it’s something we all should have :(

Like I said, we took out Kacey’s policy when she was 6mo old so she is covered but according to our agent that will probably be the only policy she gets through them unless she pays out the nose for it!

Good luck :)

February 5th, 2009 at 4:47 pm

One Trackback/Ping

  1. » 2/4/2009 Round-Up Irreverent Blogs!: A community of hands-on bloggers    Feb 04 2009 / 8pm:

    [...] from What Life Has Become blogged about an article she read about how people with diabetes, children included might never be able to obtain [...]

Leave a reply

Name (*)
Mail (will not be published) (*)
URI
Comment
Back to top