Normally a life insurance company will not check medical records after a death unless they have a good reason to do so. There is a cost for the insurance company to check medical records so they would not want to spend money to check records unless they suspected something was not right. When they do take the time and money to pull someone’s medical records, they are looking to see if the cause of death was not covered, or if the cause of death was caused by falsified information.

Falsified information on a life insurance policy is never a good idea, because when the insurance company finds out that there was information kept from them, a number of things could go wrong. The insurance company could either not honor the policy and you would receive no benefits, or there could be a substantial loss of benefits meaning you would not receive the full pay out.

Say that you took out a life insurance policy, and on the policy you said you were not a smoker. After a little while you decided to start smoking, the best thing to do is tell your life insurance company about the switch in your health conditions. Your premiums might go up because you are now a smoker, but if you don’t tell them it could lead to even worse problems. If you were to pass due to smoking issues that your life insurance company had no information of, that could greatly affect your life insurance benefits. Your beneficiaries would still receive benefits from the life insurance policy, but there’s a pretty good change they would have some type of investigation. In which they would find out you were a smoker and did not disclose of it properly. Then they would probably take a portion of the benefits to pay for a premium that covered the cost of a smokers life insurance policy.

Make sure that you disclose any health changes that could affect your policy with your life insurance company as soon as possible. If you don’t that could mean less or even no benefits from the life insurance company, depending on what information you withheld from them. Although the life insurance company can have a hard time trying to prove that you lied or withheld information on your policies application, you never want to take that change with your benefits on the line.