How does BMI affect insurance rate?

Your BMI can actually really affect your insurance rates. For those of you who don’t know what BMI is, BMI means body mass index. Your body mass is determined through a simple calculation of 703 times your height divided by your body weight times your body weight or BMI = (Weight in Pounds / Height in inches x Height in inches) x 703. To avoid doing the calculations yourself, simply input the needed numbers to our free BMI calculator.

Every country has a table for determining where you stand in terms of your BMI score. In the US if you have a score under 18.5 you are considered underweight. If your score is above 25 then you are overweight and over 30 is considered obese. If your score is over 40 you are considered morbidly obese. Gender and age are not considered, if you are over 20, when determining your BMI rating.

How BMI Affects your Health Insurance Rates

When you purchase a health insurance plan, your health insurance company is going to take your health risks and anything that could pose a significant health related problem into consideration. Your BMI helps to determine whether or not your weight is going to cause a health risk for you now or in the future. It is important to note that a high BMI doesn’t necessarily indicate that you are going to have a heart attack, diabetes, stroke, etc., but it does increase your chances of any one of these conditions affecting your health, especially if your body mass includes a high percentage of fat.

Contrary to popular belief, a high BMI doesn’t just mean that you might suffer from serious issues. Heavier people often have breathing difficulties, joint pain, arthritis, bone spurs, back problems and more. A health insurance company is going to take all of these things into consideration when quoting you a rate. Why? Simply put, it is your health insurance that is going to have to pay all the doctors fees when you have any of the above mentioned health issues or other issues that aren’t listed here.

When you apply for health insurance, you will be required to submit to a physical, which may be provided by your own doctor, or the insurance company may send you to one of their affiliate doctors. The doctor will assess all of your health risks, including doing a BMI calculation to determine whether or not you have weight issues. You can also request that your doctor do a fat to muscle ratio calculation to determine your fat percentage. This can benefit you if you are muscular and have a high BMI because muscle weighs more than fat. The doctor then forwards this information to the health insurance company who will then run a risk assessment based on that information.

If your physical shows you to be a person with a risk for a lot of health problems, your insurance rates will skyrocket. A normal and healthy BMI versus a high BMI can mean the difference between paying $350 a month or $900 a month in premiums.

Being healthy can keep your rates low and prevent future health problems as well.

How BMI Affects your Life Insurance Rates

Much like when you apply for health insurance, a life insurance company is going to run a risk assessment on you based on your BMI score, among other things. Unlike a health insurance company, however, a life insurance company isn’t worried about whether you will suffer from joint pain, bone spurs, etc., they want to know what the chances are that you will die before you pay enough in premiums to justify the benefit payout that you want for your beneficiaries.

If your health assessment determines that you have a high risk of dying, you may not be able to purchase life insurance at all. At the very least you will find that your rates are astronomically high, which may make buying life insurance unaffordable.

Determine Your BMI Ahead of Time

Before you apply for insurance, it would be beneficial for you to know what to expect ahead of time. You can learn what your BMI is right now, without having to visit a specialty website or a doctor’s office. Use a BMI calculator to quickly learn what your BMI is and what your score means.