Why Your Hospital's Life Insurance Is Not Enough

Group life is a single master policy the employer holds, with employees covered as certificate holders. The employer usually pays for a base amount, often one times salary, and offers supplemental coverage you can buy through payroll at group rates.

Because it is underwritten at the group level, it is easy to get — frequently no exam and few or no health questions up to a guaranteed issue amount. That accessibility is genuinely valuable if your health history is complicated. It is also the reason the coverage cannot follow you: the contract belongs to your employer, not to you.

Coverage generally terminates when employment or benefits eligibility ends. In practice, that means the moment you resign, get moved out of a benefits-eligible status, drop to per diem, go out on extended leave beyond the plan's limits, or retire.

Those are exactly the moments when buying new coverage is hardest. People leave nursing jobs because of burnout, injury, family illness or their own health. If your chart changed in the years since you were hired, replacing that group coverage on the open market can be more expensive or, in some cases, not available.

Some plans offer portability or conversion to an individual policy without new medical questions. That option is real and sometimes the right move — but conversion premiums are typically much higher than what the same person could have locked in years earlier through their own policy.

Run the arithmetic on your own numbers. A hundred thousand dollars sounds like a lot until it is set against a mortgage balance, a car note, a funeral, and the years your spouse would need to keep the household running while raising kids.

The way we size it: existing debts, plus final expenses, plus the number of years of income your household would need to stay in place, minus what your family already has. For most working nurses with kids, the answer lands well above what the benefits packet provides.

Employer coverage can have limitations around portability, amount, eligibility, or what happens when employment changes. Group rates also step up in age bands, so what felt inexpensive at 28 can cost meaningfully more at 48. We help you understand the details of your own plan.

Keep the employer base coverage. It costs little or nothing and it is coverage you did not have to qualify for.

Then own a level term policy of your own, long enough to outlast the mortgage and the years your children are dependent, sized to close the gap between what your household needs and what you already have. Premiums are locked for the term and the policy is not tied to any employer.

If your health history means individual underwriting is unlikely to go well, that changes the plan — sometimes maximizing supplemental group coverage, or looking at a smaller simplified-issue policy, is the better route. We will tell you which situation you are in.

Bring your benefits summary if you have it. We will read the group plan with you — the base amount, the supplemental cost, the conversion and portability language — and then look at what an individual policy would do alongside it.

One 20-minute call, at a time you choose. We are independent licensed agents, so if the answer is that your group plan plus a modest personal policy is enough, we have no reason to tell you otherwise.