Depending on how much coverage you purchase, your life insurance company may required you to do a medical exam on you. They will check your weight, height, urine, and blood to figure out whether you qualify for life insurance or not. If you do qualify for life insurance, they will categorize you with the appropriate rate. For example, if your weight matches with your height and you are in perfect health, you are very likely to be rated as "preferred" or "preferred plus". If your weight doesn't match with your height or if you have high blood pressure, you will be rated as "non-tobacco user." If you smoke or had smoke in the past 12 months, you are automatically rated "tobacco user."
Usually, if you purchased $100,000 coverage or more, a medical exam is required. Some life insurance companies advertise that no medical exam is required. I would be very careful when you buy life insurance from companies that doesn't required a medical exam. First, their rates are usually higher than the industry's average. Second, they rarely pay out their death claims. Why? You have to be in perfect health when you die, which means you have to die naturally and not by any other factors such as cancer or heart attack or from an accident.
I don't know why some people have a big deal with the medical exam. Its standard procedure and all the information collected is kept strictly private. If you take illegal drugs and it shows up in the urine exam, the medical examiner is not going to call the police. The life insurance company will just deny coverage on you. So, there's no harm done. Also, they might find something about you that you don't know about such as cancer or HIV. So there's no reason to not get a medical exam. Best of all: this medical exam is free!
