Life insurance ( Part 2) “Women in the United States generally live longer than men. But in recent years that gap has been narrowing a bit. How has that affected the life insurance business?" "It's not narrowing that much, thank goodness. We are still outliving men, we are still. We have quite a gap on them, still about 7-8 years. The only reason it's narrowing is women are doing things to themselves that they shouldn't be doing, like smoking, and all those bad habits that men have had for many years. But it is not narrowing for any other reason. And right now they say that life expectancy by the year 2030, not very far from now, will be 80, 80 years old for everybody." “Which is more of a problem, overinsuring or underinsuring? Do most people have enough life insurance?” “No. So I'll say underinsuring is certainly the norm. People think they are going to live forever and it is not going to happen to them. Most young people don't think about it and if, say, when you are very young, unless, now that young person, the example you give: if that person was responsible for his parents, financially responsible for their parents, then I will say they would want to make sure that their salary would be continued for them, so therefore they might need insurance for that reason alone.” “Do you think there's a reluctance among young adults, young people to think about life insurance, simply because it means confronting their own mortality?" “Eh, that is what it says. When I die, I'm going to leave a number of dollars to my beneficiary. Well, unfortunately it happens to all of us. And unfortunately it happens to too many young people as well as elderly people. In fact we're seeing a large number of younger, between the 30-55 category dying as opposed to the over 65 category, because people who are living longer are taking very good care of themselves.” “What about the people who need life insurance, people with diabetes, for example, with hypertension? Someone recently wrote in Newsweek magazine, I should add that it was an irate policy holder, that the people who have some sort of problem, the people who really need insurance, can't get it.” “Well, unfortunately, that's... insurance is based on risk. I said unfortunately but that's what it is. It is based on risk. Let me give you an example: if your house is burning, is that the time to run down the street and try to buy the insurance policy to protect you against the fire? No. No insurance company is going to cover that house that is burning. The same thing is true with your body. If you have developed a disease, that's the wrong time to go walking into an insurance company and say ‘I'd like to be covered for cancer, because l just contracted cancer.’ It doesn't make any sense, because life insurance or health insurance is based on sharing the risk with healthy people.” (502 words)