Here’s the deal: On a Thursday night back in December of last year, my wife goes to the emergency room for some pain. Pain is remediated late Friday morning and the cause is rare but not unheard of, but they performed a biopsy just in case.
Saturday, I applied for supplemental life insurance at work on my wife with me as the beneficiary, because the enrollment period is ending. I bugged her to fill it out, but I’m tired of putting this off for another year (Two years previously, HR never informed me that your benefits are automatically reset to minimum at the beginning of the new enrollment year; I thought they would remain the same :mad: ).
I turn in the paperwork five days later (on a Thursday) to the HR people. An hour later (I’m not making this up), I get a call from my wife who tells me the biopsy is positive for cancer (which is later diagnosed as Stage I) :eek: .
At that point the scare, the worry, the cost, the travel, etc. push that out of my mind (the tumor was excised cleanly; she’s now doing a chemo protocol to see if it will reduce the current reoccurrence rate of 40% for Stage I–all things considered she’s doing as well as one could hope for).
I later find out the odds for this cancer are like 1 in 150,000 per year for woman in general in the US. When things calmed down, I also realized that I’m pretty much screwed on having that life insurance policy being issued to me. I can’t help but feel this is like winning a Mega-macabre lottery. I mean what are the odds of these two events conspiring? And for the record, I’ve been very anal retentive about keeping up with this stuff–and yet the one time I didn’t …
Yesterday, the life insurance company called and wanted to give my wife a “physical exam” and that she had been “randomly selected.” :rolleyes: Yeah, like a hospital bill for $64,000 isn’t going to pop off a few distress flares in the insurance database system. That really annoyed me, because I’d assumed that they decided not to issue a policy for obvious reasons. So I suppose this “random” exam is a way of covering their legal butts.
But, now it got me to thinking in a more academic mode: unless one is explicitly asked, should one mention the change in one’s health (i.e., cancer) after the application is mailed, but before the policy is issued? Is that insurance fraud? Or is it being prudent? Or is it ethical? Normally, I would just as well tell them–life happens. On the other hand, is this a case where you should only provide the information they request–no more, no less? It would strike me that some in the insurance industry would be more than happy to avoid paying out on a policy as a result of somebody’s big mouth. In other words, does the consumer have rights in this area (which is NC by the way)?
My wife said she believes that we should mention this up front before the exam. ("…Ms. user_hostile, we notice a little bit of Docetaxel in your blood sample–have you been chewing on the bark of a Pacific Yew the last few days?"). It’s been a moot point for me since I got that phone call. Who’s going to believe me? Except, of course, for those out there in the Doper community.