Will your family health history affect your term insurance premium?

When you are applying for term insurance, you have to disclose your health conditions to your life insurance company for them to decide how much risk is involved in offering you a term plan.
 

This includes your family’s health history too as it often indicates if we are at risk of developing certain health disorders such as diabetes, heart diseases, cancer, and so on. 
 

But will it affect your term insurance premium? Well, not necessarily!
 

Your premium may increase if your immediate blood relations too suffer from conditions like heart disease, diabetes, and cancer. But it may vary from case to case.
 

See, to an insurer what matters most is your personal medical profile. They will assess that through a process called medical underwriting.

Based on that assessment, they’ll do one of the following:
 

• Offer you a term plan

• Reject your application

• Postpone your application 

• Accept it with an increased premium

Yes. The insurer can ask for extra medical tests or consider a premium hike only if 
 

• There are multiple cases of diabetes, heart diseases, or cancer in your family; and/or any other mental disorder.

• The diagnoses of these diseases occurred before your family members reached their 60s
   

Again, this requirement may vary from insurer to insurer.
 

In case of a family history of chronic illnesses, insurers will want to know about:
 

• Your own medical conditions

• Age of death of certain family members

• Any pattern of untimely deaths 
   

And if the said medical conditions appear in your tests, only then you may be charged a higher premium.
 

So, no matter what your family health history is, apply for term insurance as the chances of application rejection are minimal and that of a premium hike is low.

Yes, it is absolutely essential that you reveal your family health history to the insurer when buying term insurance.

Lying about your family health history can lead to denial of claims later.