What's your resting heart rate?

[shootingstar]

So in the U.S., it has always been or recent trend on using certain health measurements by private health insurers for discounts/premium payments?

The reality is that a very healthy person could be suddenly quite sick with a terminal, non-curable disease. So what happens?

My father is not overweight (never was, in fact underweight for several decades), no cardiopulmonary nor respiratory problems at all. He is 82, but has prostate cancer. Not curable at his age. He is not "penalized" by the public health care system for having cancer which of course is not caused by smoking. (He stopped smoking before he married my mother.)

He has never taken his own heart rate and wouldn't know it. But his blood pressure has tended to be slow as diagnosed by doctor over the years.

This is why I can't get just measure my heart rate as my only indcator of health, there are real life examples in my own family, what type of lifestyle and diet long term one adopts to have overall good health.

(And when a terminal disease strikes, at least one is not suffering from multiple complications because of other health problems.)

[tzvia]

I have a BP monitor available to me, and use a Polar HR watch during exercise, and have measured my HR at rest (while watching TV) at around 49~50. Before I took up cycling again in 2008, after stopping in 2002, it hovered in the low 60s at rest. My BP at that time was in the 140s/low 90s. When I last checked it was 117/79. So I guess that between loosing about 30 lbs, exercising, and eating somewhat healthier, I am going in the right direction, at least as much as these things matter.

Being 52 and still about 20 lbs overweight (I am an apple- used to have a Goodyear truck tire around the middle, now it is more like a couple of MTB 2.1s.) Working on it but it has been hard to get those last 20 off. I don't dwell on the numbers, (the BP meter is my mother's, she bought it when she was advised she was borderline high BP), but it is interesting to see how they changed as I got myself into better shape.

Health insurance companies really don't have a much better way to quantify rates- even if we all got whole body MRIs, there would be risks and chance that fluctuate with hereditary and exposure/lifestyle factors. BP, HR and bloodwork are better than darts or guessing, but in the end it all feels like an educated guess.

I've known people who were 'the picture of health' just keel over with a brain hemorrhage. I've known people who were overweight, smoked, had high pressure jobs and lived to ripe old age. I've had relatives told they had 6 months, live 20 years. The science of health is really very interesting, as it involves so much chance.

[NbyNW]

So in the U.S., it has always been or recent trend on using certain health measurements by private health insurers for discounts/premium payments?

IME it comes into play more for life insurance rates. But DH and I have not yet reached a time where this would have been an issue for us in applying for health insurance, so maybe others have had different experiences.

We've bought individual insurance a couple of times while in between jobs and they will quote us premium/deductible packages based on primary and no. of dependants before we have even sent our health questionnaires in.

The larger issue is whether you have a pre-existing condition that could get you denied coverage entirely (but after that there may be state programs that you can qualify for). DH really goofed on this once: he indicated that I had a spinal cord injury when all I had was a fracture to two vertebrae. So I got denied coverage. I had to spend a whole day on the phone clearing that one up!