When deciding what rates to offer an individual, life insurance agencies take many factors into consideration, from family medical history to a person’s current medications and diagnoses. One factor is body type, which most agencies assess using the body mass index (BMI). Using this model, your overall health gets represented as a formula that considers your height and weight. Since a higher BMI often indicates a predisposition to conditions such as Type 2 diabetes and heart disease, life insurance agencies view people with a high BMI as riskier to insure.
Unfortunately, a person’s BMI may not accurately reflect one’s overall health or risk for chronic medical conditions. In a recent Health IQ survey, only 58 percent of people surveyed could identify a situation in which someone with a higher than normal BMI could still receive lower rates. That number was lower among millennials; only 40 percent of millennials answered the survey question correctly. These percentages demonstrate a gap in how well people understand BMI and its effect on life insurance rates.
Want to know what you can do to get better life insurance rates? First, take a Health IQ quiz to explore the relationship between body type and life insurance rates. Once you understand BMI and its alternatives, you’ll understand why Health IQ, a life insurance agency, focuses on other measures of health, such as waist-to-hip ratio. With Health IQ, you can also receive lower rates for being health conscious and leading a healthy lifestyle. Explore the in-depth FAQs at HealthIQ.com to learn more about obtaining special rates on a life insurance policy through Health IQ.
