Have you ever been sitting in an office and overheard someone ask another person whether they’ve had unprotected anal sex with more than one partner in the past five years?
I have. Welcome to the world of insurance applications.
(To make it slightly better, the person being asked was on the other end of a telephone and didn’t have to answer in front onlookers. And for what it’s worth, that particular question seems to be an Australian specialty. I’ve never encountered it on a New Zealand form. Draw your own conclusions about what the actuaries know about Australians that they don’t feel the need to ask about kiwis.)
When you apply for personal insurance, such as income protection insurance, the application forms require you to answer some remarkably personal questions.
If you’ve been through the process yourself, you know the drill. Pages of questions about your health, your habits, your family history. It can feel tedious and invasive. For some people it’s genuinely stressful, dredging up medical history you’d rather not revisit, calling family members and asking them questions about their own medical foibles, wondering whether that GP visit three or thirteen years ago is going to cost you.
I want to offer a perspective that might make this process slightly more interesting and engaging.
Those questions exist because actuaries have spent decades researching what drives long-term health outcomes. And the picture they paint of your health is quite different – and in many ways more revealing – than what you’ll find anywhere else.
Different lenses on the same body
We have more ways to think about our health than ever before. But each sees through a particular lens, and the lens shapes what’s visible.
When you visit a GP, the conversation is almost always oriented around right now. What’s wrong? What symptoms are you experiencing? What can we do about it today?
A good GP, especially one you’ve seen for years, will also cover preventive ground: cardiovascular risk assessments, diabetes screening, wellness checks. But the system GPs operate within is built around episodes of care. Fifteen-minute consultations, funded around presenting complaints. Even the best GP is working within a structure that rewards diagnosing and treating what’s in front of them, not probabilistic risk assessment across decades. The limitation isn’t the doctor. It’s the model.
A personal trainer sees your health through a different lens again. Body composition, movement quality, cardiovascular fitness, strength. These matter, but they’re measuring physical capacity in the present, which correlates to the probability of something going wrong over decades, but not in every sense. Your trainer can tell you your resting heart rate is excellent. They can’t usually tell you much about your family history of bowel cancer or whether your mental health pattern over the past ten years is a red flag.
Then there’s the longevity crowd: the Peter Attia school of thinking. VO2 max, metabolic health markers, zone 2 training, continuous glucose monitors, DEXA scans. It’s genuinely useful, and it’s oriented toward the long-term in a way that standard GP care often isn’t. But it’s also a lens built for people who are already healthy enough and wealthy enough to be optimising. It’s heavy on biomarkers and light on the messier variables like occupation, financial stress, and behavioural history.
An insurance application asks a different set of questions, which act as another lens. Across a population of people like you, what’s the probability of something going wrong over the next 10, 20, or 30 years, that will be significant enough to result in a claim under the policy? Is this a risk worth taking for the insurer (acting, in a sense, on behalf of other people paying their premiums), and if it’s a risk worth taking, does it need to be priced differently?
It’s an entirely different lens on your health. Your GP is looking at you as an individual in a moment. Your trainer is measuring your physical capacity. The longevity specialist is optimising your biomarkers. The insurance form is looking at you as a data point in a pattern that actuaries have studied across millions of lives over many decades, and it can cover dimensions the others don’t touch.
Why they’re asking
There’s a natural tension in the insurance application process that’s worth being honest about. The insurer isn’t asking these questions for your benefit. They’re asking because they need to assess and price risk. The more they know about you, the more accurately they can do that. For some people, that means exclusions, loadings, or declines. It can feel like disclosure works against you.
But the information the questions point to is valuable. And if you’re thoughtful, could be even more valuable to you than it is to the insurer. They use your answers to set a premium. You can use the same information to understand where your real health risks lie.
What the lens misses
It’s also worth being clear about what the insurance lens doesn’t cover. The forms are assessing risk within a specific window — roughly your working life, up to age 65. They’re not modelling your health trajectory into your 80s and 90s the way the longevity crowd is. A condition that typically emerges at 75 isn’t on their radar, even if it’s very much on yours.
And there are blind spots within that window too. There’s nothing on these forms about the quality of your relationships, your sense of purpose, how much you exercise, how well you sleep, or how you manage stress. There’s growing evidence these things matter a great deal — but they’re hard to measure, hard to verify, and don’t yet produce clean actuarial data. The insurance form’s limitations tend to be in exactly the places where self-knowledge matters most.
A different kind of health check
Next time you’re filling out an insurance application, or reviewing an existing one, try reading it differently. Not as a form to get through, but as a map of what the data says is most likely to derail your health over the coming decades.
If the insurer cares enough about something to make you disclose it, that’s a signal. It means the actuarial data, drawn from millions of lives over many decades, says this variable meaningfully affects your long-term health outcomes. That makes it an idiosyncratic risk worth paying attention to, regardless of whether you’re applying for insurance.
It’s not a complete map. But it covers territory that other perspectives aren’t designed to show you. For many New Zealanders, the most comprehensive health risk assessment they’ll ever complete isn’t administered by a doctor, a personal trainer, or a longevity specialist. It’s buried in an insurance application that most people just want to get through as quickly as possible.
While writing this article, I went through several insurance applications to see what the questions actually reveal. Why do they ask about bankruptcy? Why does kava get its own line? Why do they want to know your engine size? I’ll walk through what I found in a companion article.