Attending Physician's Statement (APS) Definition
The Dictionary of Insurance Terms and Definitions
An Attending Physician's Statement, or APS, is a document which is often sought by life insurance companies when they consider an application. An attending physician's statement is composed by the medical caregiver who treats the individual that an application proposes to insure.
Why would your life insurance company need an Attending Physician's Statement? The insurer makes a big investment any time it's willing to provide coverage to anyone, so it had better fully understand the mortality risk of any proposed insured. The description provided in an APS is evidence of the proposed insured's mortality risk.
The medical caregiver that prepares the APS may be someone other than a primary care physician. For instance, if a life insurance underwriter desires information on an individual's recovery from pancreatic cancer, he/she will likely request an APS from that individual's specialist, such as a surgeon or radiologist.
An Attending Physician's Statement can be a very long document or a collection of documents. Consequently, it can take a long time to prepare an APS. And if you've ever waited 45 minutes in a doctor's office, then 30 minutes in an exam room, for 10 minutes of a doctor's time, you may correctly imagine how long it can take a doctor to fill an insurer's request for an APS.
The wait for an Attending Physician's Statements and other medical records is the most time-consuming step in the life insurance application process. This step can be bypassed by purchasing no-exam life insurance, but no-exam insurance products are much more expensive.
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