Transcript

In this video, I’m going to step you through how to take a medical exam. It’s actually very simple. I just want to clarify, when I say medical exam, there is typically no blood or urine test, nobody is coming out to your home, you’re not running on a treadmill or anything like that.

A medical exam these days consists almost entirely of a simple phone interview with a paramedical person, generally takes around 20 minutes and the purpose of the medical interview is simply for you to disclose your medical history to the insurance company. That’s it. There’s no pass or fail, there’s no judgement, you’re just going to do a data dump from your head over to the para-med through these questions. What you need to do is very simple, listen to the questions and answer them as they are asked. Now that’s important because by natural tendency, you won’t do that. You will normally just say “yes everything is fine” because perhaps it is fine, but that’s not the question that was asked.

So here’s an example of the type of questions they might ask you. They might say something like “have you ever had any tests, investigations, injury, treatment, or surgery on your eyes?”. And a typical consumer will say “no”. Now, they’re not lying, but they didn’t actually answer the question because the question was actually 5-in-1. So if they never had any investigations, injury, treatment or surgery on their eyes, that’s fine, but the question also asks if they’ve ever had any tests, and for most of us, in fact almost all of us, the correct answer should be something like “Yes, I get my eyes tested every couple of years, and my eyes are fine. Or I wear glasses and that corrects my vision to 20-20 and my eyes are fine.” That’s the correct way to answer all of these questions, going into a lot of detail.

This is actually beneficial because it makes underwriting a lot quicker, it gives us better answers, cheaper premiums because it lets underwriters properly evaluate your medical history and discard stuff that’s no longer a risk. So, take your time, listen to the questions and answer them as asked and you will get the best policy for the cheapest premiums that you can get.
So on one end, is a true no-medical exam life insurance policy. In the industry it’s called a guaranteed issue, there’re no medical questions and everybody qualifies. Unfortunately, these policies have limited coverages, generally, it’s $50,000, they’re very high premiums and they’re limited to accidental death only in the first 2 years of the policy, so it’s barely even life insurance in the first 2 years.