time bomb waiting to go off...

The amount of people in Britain who are having problems getting health insurance and life insurance is growing dramatically and this is partly due to the rising number of overweight and obese individuals. The problem of getting insurance is especially acute if you are an obese diabetic. Life insurance is extremely important for some people as if you need a mortgage or a loan of some sort many banks will not give you one unless you first insure your life to cover the potential liability. If you are in a high risk health category you will either have to pay a much heftier premium every year for a life insurance policy or the company may just decide that you are too much of a risk and show you the door.

There are some specialist life insurance brokers who can help you but they have over the previous year had to deal with an increasing number of claims and thus are becoming more reluctant to help. The big insurance companies have also worked out that in the future the numbers claiming for sickness due to the obesity will rise and thus they must start to increase the premiums now to protect themselves for the future.

In the very competitive insurance market it is necessary to target people who are likely to make claims and exclude them if the companies want to show healthy profits. Since they have realised that obesity is costing them money and the simple course of action for insurers is to exclude obese people from future policies. The Association of British Insurers recently described the teenage obesity problem in the United Kingdom as a “time bomb waiting to go off”.

If you need yet another incentive to help you lose weight think about the fact that your weight problem could mean that you are not able to get life insurance and thus you won’t be able to get a loan to buy a house.