Posted by gary (209.187.112.23) on January 07, 2000 at 16:28:35:
In Reply to: Has anyone bought Life Insurance lately? posted by Lee Moore on January 07, 2000 at 01:16:41:
nearly all the lit that bothers to address prognosis and wider aspects of CH says:
ON OUR SIDE:
1. there is no structural or disease pathology present
2. if anything is said about age, it is that people tend to "outgrow" them (I'm patiently waiting - I figure "30 years and out" works for gov't jobs, it ought to work for CH)
BUT BUT BUT
do you suppose they are taking the medlit bit about clusterheads being heavy drinkers & smokers, and projecting that into their assumptions ?
frankly, if I were an insurance medical assesment honcho AND I saw that appear as often as it does in the literature, I would put a big red flag on CH too
HMMMM ??
what to do about that ?
about smoking/drinking:
I happen to BELIEVE the bit about there being a notably higher occurrence of smoking and excess drinking among clusterheads, so I'd be hard put to argue the big picture with them-
BUT
I know they used to back off somewhat on smokers if you had been smokefree for 3, or 5, or somesuch number years - but that may have changed since all the secondhand smoke & long term effect data has come out
perhaps if you/we could document to the insurance Co's that as an individual, we didn't smoke or drink, even if we have CH, it might help
of course, if we can do this, we will undoubtedly live longer anyway and then we don't need the insurance
HMMMMM?
wanna bet they got THAT figured too ?
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they probably look at the bit about suicide rates also
THAT one I DON'T believe, but how the hell do you prove it ?
some doc probably had a patient off himself once upon a time, included a comment in a journal article, and a legend was born
I can think of a whole lot of categories, very large categories that probably have much higher suicide rates -
like alcoholics
but oops - just closed the circle didn't I ?????
DAMN DAMN DAMN
beat again
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but BE CAREFUL no matter what
this discussion assumes you have been turned down by the big, stable, mutual insurance companies--
that leaves the gollywowwhatadeal outfits that do all the TV hype advertising - usually to old folks
if you do the math on most of those outfits that sell "no turn down, high risk" insurance, you find out you'd be better off putting the premium money in the bank
they're just a modern vesion of the "burial insurance" that used to be so common in the south, marketed to a segment of the population that was predictably (at that time) unable to compute how seriously they were getting screwed
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