When you apply for a life insurance policy, or a health insurance policy, you can expect to be asked a lot of questions about your health. You may have heard that many insurance companies will assign a lower premium to people who are non-smokers, and a higher one to people who smoke. What you may not realize is what, exactly, will cause the insurance company to consider you to be a smoker.
Insurance companies want to know a whole lot about you. They are very interested in what may seem to you like tiny little details about your health because they are trying to figure out how expensive it would be for them to insure you. Ultimately, the insurance company is hoping to find customers who won’t make very many claims. They don’t want to end up spending more on a customer than they are getting from that customer in premium payments. In order to stay in business, they need to continue to make a profit.
We all know that smoking does cause several health problems, and that it can exacerbate many others. Smokers tend to die 10 or more years earlier than non-smokers will. Smoking can cause cancer and asthma and lung problems.
When you apply for life insurance, or for health insurance, you usually have to submit to a physical. The physical generally takes place after you have done some form of interview that involved answering a series of very specific questions about your health.
The physical is a way that the insurance company can check to make sure that you were not lying when you answered those questions. In general, the physical you must submit to in order to get a health insurance policy is more extensive than the one you go through in order to get life insurance. Both of them, however, will take samples of your blood and urine, which the insurance company will have analyzed.
What, exactly defines a person as someone who smokes? Common sense would say that if the person smokes cigarettes, or cigars, then that person is a smoker. This definition would hold true whether the person has been smoking for several years, or if they just started yesterday. Insurance companies would agree with you on this. If you smoke one cigarette in the past twelve months, then insurance companies will define you as a smoker.
However, insurance companies will expand that definition to include people who chew tobacco, or who use tobacco gum or tobacco patches. They aren’t smoking it, but they still have nicotine in their system. That’s all it takes for an insurance company to charge you a higher rate. Those that use e-cigarettes, a device that produces water vapor instead of smoke, but still delivers nicotine into a person’s system, will also end up paying more on their insurance premiums than non-smokers will.
Image by Jessica Jasper on Flickr