Simplified issue

Simplified issue life insurance skips the medical exam and the blood and urine tests. Instead, the insurer decides based on a short health questionnaire plus electronic checks: prescription history, the MIB database, motor vehicle records and sometimes other data. Decisions can come in minutes or days rather than weeks.

The questions are typically yes-or-no knockouts, such as whether you've been diagnosed with or treated for cancer, heart disease or kidney failure in recent years. Answer yes to one and you're usually declined or steered to a different product; answer no to all, and if the database checks support your answers, you're approved at one of a few price tiers. Hypothetically, a 55-year-old might qualify for $50,000 of simplified issue whole life without seeing a doctor, at a higher price per $1,000 than a healthy person would pay for a fully underwritten policy.

It's a middle ground between fully underwritten coverage and guaranteed issue, which asks no health questions. Healthy people often pay more for the convenience, and coverage limits are typically lower. Misstatements are still grounds for rescission during the contestable period. See simplified issue life insurance and no-medical-exam term life insurance: how it works.