Under Coverage.
Publicly traded Insure.com’s blog hosted two entries in which employee Joe White described homosexuality as “the biggest risk to life expectancy that goes unrecognized by insurance companies.” Being gay, he goes on, all the while citing bunk research, can be just as disastrous as smoking. Insure.com CEO Bob Bland promised to investigate the matter, but did point out that insurance companies do regularly reject people based on HIV status and other “risky hobbies.” Still, he insists the company wants “to do a wider-ranging issue that is fair and balanced…” Bill O’Reilly voices Insure.com’s commercials. [Box Turtle Bulletin]
Box Turtle Bulletin is too anxious to bash Insure.com and shame on them for posting private e-mails from me to them without my permission. me. Insure.com has no political agenda and has been open and forthright in dealing with Box Turtle’s many recent inquiries.
The article(s) they’ve referenced are but one or two of more than 3,000 insurance-related articles that we have written and posted at Insure.com since 1995.
This particular article talks about third party studies that have claimed that homosexuals have a markedly different life expectancy than heterosexuals. We posted this as a human interest story from an actuarial standpoint and without any political agenda whatsoever and without comment as to the accuracy of the third party research.
One’s sexual orientation has no bearing on how a life insurance agency, including ours, would go about quoting life insurance.
We represent 35 leading life insurance companies and do not know of any that ask about sexual orientation at the time of quoting or at anytime during underwriting. Furthermore, sexual orientation is NOT considered or asked about in the quoting or underwriting of a life insurance policy. When quoting a life insurance policy, we, as any agent and broker would, ask only those questions that are required to be asked by each life insurance company, which is typically an exhaustive set of 50-100 questions about one’s health history, past and current. Every U.S. life insurance company that I know of does ask each applicant if they are HIV positive and, to the best of my knowledge, each company will automatically then decline such an applicant, so apparently the life underwriters are convinced that that medical condition is somehow relative to one’s longevity.
As I explained to Box Turtle people earlier last week we’ve been (innocently) delayed in having our writers and editors take a another look at this article, but still expect to do so over the next 4 weeks because we want to make certain that we encompass all available current research on this topic.
Once again, Insure.com has no political agenda on this issue and never has had any such agenda.
On our website http://www.boxturtlebulletin.com, Mr. Bland phrased his intentions a bit differently:
“We expect to take another look at this article over the next 4 weeks because we want to make certain that we encompass all available current research on this topic. We think that there’s a human interest story to be researched here on why all U.S. life insurers decline HIV-positive applicants (many of whom are healthy and have been for two decades) but will not even attempt to segregate gays who, according to a growing body of evidence, may have a much shorter lifespan than non-gays.”
It will be interesting to see what “growing body of evidence” Mr. Bland quotes, but from his comments it appears that it will continue to be the discredited Paul Cameron.
It will also be fascinating to hear how Mr. Bland suggests that the insurance company “segregate” gays.
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