The process that goes on behind the scenes after you hit “submit” on the online forms to determine your eligibility for burial insurance may seem shrouded with mystery. However, it’s actually a relatively simple and logical set of steps that matches your unique health and lifestyle circumstances with a provider that can best meet your needs. There are three initial steps that help to determine whether a company is a good fit for you: 

1. A review of your answers to a list of basic health questions (unless you choose a no health question policy route)
2. A look at your prescription history
3. A review of your MIB file for any relevant records. 

Once these three categories are covered, the insurance company has a complete picture of your circumstances and can tell you what kind of coverage they can provide. 

How Burial Insurance Companies Evaluate Your Health History

Most likely your answers to the health questions alone will provide the most important piece of information to determine your eligibility. If you do have pre-existing health conditions, your specific circumstances will greatly impact what kinds of coverage you qualify for. Pre-existing health conditions don’t automatically disqualify you for all coverage—most companies are more than willing to work with people who have disabilities or chronic conditions, and often your eligibility isn’t adversely affected at all. More often than not, an individual dealing with a chronic illness or disability will simply need to undergo a waiting period, or pay an elevated monthly premium.

Why Final Expense Insurance Companies Look At Prescription History

In addition to looking at your health, broadly, every final expense company will need to look at your entire prescription history. This helps to validate your answers to the health questions, and gives an even clearer picture of your health history. They will be taking note of the names of the medications you’ve been prescribed, when they were first prescribed, and how often you refill them. Certain medications such as narcotics, prescribed for chronic pain, may indicate a need for higher premiums, due to potentially dangerous side effects.

What MIB Means For Your Insurance

MIB stands for Medical Information Bureau. The MIB is an organization that provides an information gathering and sharing service for insurance companies to help them assess risk when determining the eligibility of individual applicants. Whenever an individual applies for life insurance with one of the 99% of insurance companies that participates with the MIB, that company will file a brief report about you with the MIB. This limited report is stored in a high security, limited-access database in a proprietary and highly confidential coded format. You can think of the entire process as being the insurance industry’s version of a credit report, or a background check. Personal information, stored in a high-security database, accessible only by member institutions, for purposes of identifying or certifying an individual’s characteristics.

We Are Here to Help

These three simple steps give USA Life everything we need to match you with an insurance provider that will meet your individual needs. Flexible, personalized service is always our goal and we will strive to surpass your expectations for ease of use and quality results. Since our inception, we’ve provided clients from a myriad of health and lifestyle backgrounds with the security and confidence of knowing that their end of life care is covered.