Will a critical illness insurance provider take my life on risk?

When it comes down to looking around for insurance providers that offer critical illness insurance cover, there are generally certain criteria’s that need to be met by the applicant. As a guide an applicant must be aged between the ages of eighteen and seventy years old. Each insurance provider has an upper age limit in their insurance products that they sell, but this can depend on a few different factors. These can be the plan you are choosing to be covered for which can be different insurances such as life insurance, critical illness insurance, income protection cover, accident sickness and unemployment cover and whole of life insurance. The amount you want to be covered for, the length of the plan you are interested in taking out, any pre existing medical issues or illnesses that you may have had and generally the insurance providers parameters regarding the age of an applicant.

When you first apply to any insurance company one of the first things that they will do is collate personal information from you. This will be used to calculate your premium. Some of the very first pieces of information that an insurance provider will gather from an applicant will be their sex, age, if you smoke, your occupation and your height and weight. These are generally the basic details that are needed in terms of personal information just to get to the quotation stage so that you can have an appropriate idea of how much your premium may possibly be. Upon the application stage of your critical illness insurance the insurance provider will gather more detailed information from an applicant in the form of a series of questions. These may be along the lines of your general lifestyle and leisure traits, any past or pre existing medical history that you may have had, this will include your direct family normally before the age of 65.

There are a number of critical illness insurance claims that are rejected every year. Some of the claims that are rejected can be down to the insured person(s) not fully disclosing or failing to disclose an illness or a material fact that may affect an insurer’s decision at the time of the application. No matter how irrelevant you think something is, be it routine tests, it is essential that you disclose all known information to an insurance provider. If in doubt you should check with the advisor to see if it is important to disclose the information you are querying, this way you know you have done everything correctly and in the event of a claim there should be nothing picked up that has not been disclosed.

If you have a medical background where you have been to the doctors on numerous occasions and despite your best efforts you can not remember what you went for, it can be in your best interests to request a copy of your medical history and background from your GP. This will ensure that you have absolutely everything, no matter how relevant it is, that you can advise or even send a copy to the insurance provider. In some cases your doctor’s surgery may charge for this.

Some insurance providers allow you to send sensitive and personal information in the post to them if you feel that you do not want to discuss it over the phone, talk to an advisor about it or that it is too detailed to divulge over in a telephone conversation. This can delay the process of your application in the ways of an underwriting decision, however at least the information you are providing will be detailed and you are sure the insurance provider is aware of it.