I have a 20 year term policy that ended about two years ago. I started looking for replacement term insurance as a cancer survivor, and was told all the blah blah blah about increased premiums, reduced benefits, an add-on “you had cancer once” penalty etc.
I tend to wander through PubMed from time to time, looking at the latest stuff on colon cancer, especially return of colon cancer, and I see that someone who is my sex and age who has never had cancer would have a 3% chance of contracting it in their lifetime. I found a couple of long term studies that showed a breakdown of colon cancer returning by a lot of categories. On the age and sex category, the chance of that same person my age and sex having colon cancer again is between 1 and 2%.
So even though the underwriting shows less of a risk for me than if I had never had cancer, insurance company gonna charge me with a cancer premium penalty multiplier that is untethered from medical and actuarial evidence. Capitalism and all.
But returning to the point I was trying to make, the fact that I now pound vitamin C, D and E, watch my diet and exercise more -and get numerous bloodwork and scans and colonoscopies - undoubtedly makes the reoccurrence (or at least a fatal reoccurrence) less likely then some dude my age walking down the street who never had cancer.
That and medical marijuana are a couple good things that came from me getting cancer I guess. And maybe one other. My ex-wife is rumored to have said about my cancer diagnosis: “Ubet always infuriated me with his risktaking and never worrying about anything…this is only gonna make that worse”. She was right.