Underwriting for Cancer

Based on experience, cancer is the fourth most common reason for admission to a long-term care facility. Metastatic cancer is most often encountered when cancer spreads to a distant organ via the lymph or circulatory system. Common sites for cancer of the elderly include the breast, lungs, prostate, colon, pancreas, lymph, brain and bone.

All normal tissues grow, live for a time and die, and all are replaced by new tissue. Cancer growth does not follow this orderly pattern, but rather has increased metabolism, growth and reproduction rate, and an increased blood supply. The growth process serves no useful purpose, but continues unchecked and is not controlled by the laws of normal growth. The tumor cells may invade locally or spread distantly, and always at the expense of the host.

Treatment of cancer may involve surgery, radiation therapy or chemotherapy. The treatment of choice is surgery where complete removal of the cancer is possible and inspection microscopically reveals no evidence of spreading outside the organ or to the lymph nodes.

Staging can be thought of as a system for describing cancers to determine the treatment for a given tumor and the prognosis for the patient. When staging a cancer, the doctor takes into consideration the size of the tumor, how deeply it has invaded into the surrounding tissue, whether it has spread to adjacent lymph nodes and whether it has spread to other organs.

An underwriter takes many factors into consideration: location, date of diagnosis, type of treatment and date of final treatment, complications, recurrence, staging, cancer type and persistence or change in tumor marker levels. Companies have widely varying guidelines on cancer which is why an agent with access to multiple companies is good to work with.