Burial insurance on dialysis

Nothing here is medical advice and nothing here should change how anyone manages a health condition or a course of treatment. Underwriting rules differ from one insurance company to the next and change without notice. The outcome of any application is decided by the carrier on the individual case, not by a website.

The honest answer

Someone receiving dialysis today should expect a guaranteed issue policy. It asks no health questions at all, cannot be declined for health inside its age band, and applies a two year period during which death from natural causes returns the premiums paid plus interest rather than the full benefit. Accidental death is paid in full from day one, and after two years the full benefit is paid for any cause.

That is a real policy and it does the job it is bought for. What it is not is a level benefit policy at level benefit prices, and anyone promising that after a dialysis answer is either misunderstanding the market or hoping you will not read the contract.

Kidney disease and dialysis are different questions

A great many people describe themselves as having kidney disease and assume the answer above applies to them. Often it does not. Applications separate the two, and the gap between them is enormous.

General market patterns rather than a promise about any company. Every application is underwritten on its own facts.

If the kidney question is tangled up with diabetes, the diabetes underwriting page covers how the two are read together, because the combination is usually assessed as one picture rather than as two separate answers.

Why dialysis carries no look back

Most questions on these applications are about dated events. A heart attack, a stent, a course of cancer treatment. They sit inside a twelve, twenty four or thirty six month window, and the market reopens when the window passes.

Dialysis is not a past event. It is an ongoing replacement for a function the body has stopped performing, so there is no interval of time after which the answer improves while treatment continues. That is why the question is written without a window, and why waiting does not help in the way it helps after cancer treatment.

What the underwriter actually asks

• Whether dialysis is currently received, and the month and year it started.
• Whether it is haemodialysis at a centre or peritoneal dialysis at home, and how many sessions a week.
• Whether dialysis has been advised or scheduled but not yet started. Most forms ask about advised treatment as well as current treatment.
• What caused the kidney failure, most often diabetes, high blood pressure or a specific kidney disease.
• The stage of chronic kidney disease if it is known, and on a minority of forms a kidney function figure.
• Whether a kidney transplant has been received, when, and whether you are on a transplant waiting list.
• Whether there is also diabetes, heart failure, a heart attack or a stroke. Kidney failure alongside a cardiac history is treated far harder than either part.
• Whether there have been hospital admissions in the last twelve or twenty four months, and how many.
• Whether you need help with activities of daily living, receive home health or hospice care, or live in a nursing or assisted living facility.

Transplants and waiting lists

Organ transplant appears on the knockout page of most applications as its own question, separate from dialysis and usually with no time limit. Being on a transplant waiting list is asked about in the same place.

A very small part of the market will consider a transplant that took place many years ago with stable function since. It is worth an agent asking. For most people, the practical answer after a transplant or on a waiting list is the same guaranteed issue policy, and the useful conversation is about sizing and start date rather than about hunting for a level benefit offer that is not there.

What guaranteed issue gives you

General features of the product across the market. Terms differ by company and by state.

The two year clock runs from the day the policy is issued. Every week spent deciding is added to the end of that period rather than taken off it, which is the strongest practical reason not to wait.

Sizing the policy to something real

Guaranteed issue costs more for each thousand dollars of cover and is capped, so the useful exercise is deciding what the money actually has to pay for.

A burial once the cemetery has billed commonly totals about $15,395. Funeral home charges alone for a service with viewing and a metal casket run about $8,300. A cremation with a service is nearer $6,280, and a direct cremation nearer $2,202. The calculator gives your own state figure.

There is usually a budget already under strain from treatment and travel to appointments. Choose a premium that can be paid every month for years without a difficult decision, since most of these contracts return nothing if they lapse. A policy sized to a cremation that stays in force is worth considerably more to a family than a larger one that does not.

A policy already in force is safe

If a life policy was bought before kidney failure developed, none of this applies to it. A whole life premium is fixed, the cover does not expire, and a company cannot cancel it or raise the price because health has changed. The health assessment was made once, at application.