Life Insurance After Stroke
After you recover from a stroke and want to think about purchasing an insurance policy, what is the effect? Will there be a difference in premiums because of your condition?
In most cases, the answer to that question is probably yes, but that will depend on the insurance company, the severity of the stroke, and your prognosis for a complete recovery.
Some people can have a stroke and recover completely while others may never return to their former lifestyle and always need to take extra precautions.
With a stroke being one of those conditions that vary from patient to patient, it is likely one of the times that an insurance company will require a medical history.
Before they decide to insure you or even determine how much of a potential risk your condition is, they will need to know the extent of damage the stroke caused. Even if you are sitting right in front of the agent, and he can see no obvious signs of stroke-related disability, he will want to know that from a doctor.
As strange as it seems in today’s modern medicine, some people have what appears to be a mild stroke, go on for months, or years, and suddenly die of stroke-related complications. Of course, that is not something the doctor knew at the time, nor is it something he would have told the insurance company.
At the time, it was out of his realm of knowledge, but the fact remains that strokes can be minor or they can lead to long term disability. The insurance company wants to know where you fit into the scope of things.
Unlike cancer, having a stroke does not necessarily mean years of paying high premiums or finding out that you are uninsurable. Having one stroke does not necessarily mean that you will have another one or that a stroke will be fatal, though it many cases, people do have recurrent strokes.
That doesn’t mean that insurance companies do not consider stroke victims in the high-risk category, but it is a different category from that of cancer, which is more frequently recurrent. A stroke depends on how quickly treatment was administered, and insurance companies know that many people recover completely. They know, also, that some people die of complications years later, so they have to set their premiums accordingly. In order to avoid any of the red tape involved with obtaining life insurance after a stroke, make sure that you have it in force from the time you start working.
