Couldn’t help commenting on a not-so-politically-correct story in the Herald the other day by Deborah Coddington about...
o—b—e—s—i—t—y.
According to Deborah, John Birkbeck, a professor in human nutrition from Massey University told a journalist "You can't get over-fat without eating more calories than you expend."
Seems this wasn’t the PC thing to say. Anyway… that’s not what I want to talk about.
Deborah’s article goes on to say how we dance around the ‘fat’ issue so as not to hurt people’s feelings but we don’t mind confronting people head on when it comes to charging higher life insurance premiums.
Whilst we’re happy to discriminate against all and sundry… we’re way too PC to discriminate against obesity.
Well I’m here to tell you that Life Insurance is the great leveller. You see, it’s all about mortality statistics, and the fact is, obese people die earlier.
So yes, WE DO CHARGE MORE if you are, ahem, short for your weight.
And because we have statistics to back up our pricing, it’s NOT discrimination.
Finally… how do we work out what premiums to charge? We ask you on your insurance application to tell us your height and weight then we sneakily work out your BMI. BMI stands for body mass index, calculated by taking your mass in kilograms and dividing it by the square of your height in metres. Generally a ‘healthy’ range is around 18.5 to 32. Higher than around 32 increases your mortality risk and attracts higher insurance premiums.
