Hi Jerry:

Hope you don't mind me adding my two penneth - I have been monitoring this thread. I seem to recall that you bought term assurance and when it expired, you were angry/shocked at the rate that the insurer demanded in order to provide you with continuous cover, underwritten at the age you hit at the expiry date of your term assurance?

Term assurance has always been the cheapest form of life cover. It is offered to allow people to have cover when they perceive they need it most eg., a 25yr old has a baby, and she buys 20yr term assurance to provide essential cover while "young Johnny" is dependent and unable to look after himself. It may cost her £50.00 per month for a given sum assured. Of course, she could have bought "convertible-term" assurance which can be switched to "whole of life" at any point in the term without submission of further medical evidence. That was £60.00 per month and she didn't want to pay the extra tenner - or, she just couldn't afford to pay it coz she had a new family and all it's incumbent expense. Or, she could have bought "whole of life" cover and that would have cost her £70.00 per month. Now she definately couldn't (or didn't want to) afford that.

So, people when buying life cover take their choice at the outset and sometimes are "penny wise but pound foolish". Whilst I hear what you say about underwriting so that the "good fortune of the many pays for the misfortune of the few", the original concept, unfortunately, with fee-hungy solicitors, "professional claimants", compensation oriented consumers, ordinary shareholders (maybe like you) expecting a dividend on their investment in a reputable, prudent life assurance company (who expect the underwriter to realise the appropriate premium for the risk), the old "concept" does not hold water anymore - in fact many insurers just end up "top heavy" with the "many" being expected to be paid for by the "few" - the reverse of the original concept. Jeez, they are now proposing genetic underwriting to avoid risks that they know will suffer from this or that disease in due course. My gripe would be if they did not offer cover for a risk at all, because everything, theoretically, is insurable. There is no such thing as a bad risk - just a bad premium for that risk.

Therefore, if you don't want your risk to be re-underwritten at age 60 or 61 or whatever, you have to make that decision when you originally take your cover out 15 (or 25yrs) years before.

Whilst I am a developer, I have been developing mostly in the insurance world for the past 22yrs, so, I feel I have enough experience in this area to pass comment. I hope my "take" is of interest to you.

Best