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January 25, 2024 at 03:20 PM
What You Need to Know
- George helped create the modern life insurance underwriting field.
- He developed a unique strategy for gauging how coverage applicants had responded to the COVID-19 pandemic.
- He might have unpublished pages of a Philip K. Dick novel somewhere in his papers.
Henry “Hank” George — a longtime life insurance underwriter and underwriter educator — died Jan. 10 in Milwaukee at age 77, his family announced earlier this week.
George may now be best known to the general life insurance public as the editor of Hot Notes, a free, and freewheeling, electronic newsletter about the intricacies of health-related risk, in which he wrote about everything from worries about smoking and obesity to concerns about the risk associated with unhealed sores on people’s scalps.
During the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, he joked that underwriters should assess insurance applicants’ state of mind by asking whether they had responded to the pandemic by accumulating 60 or more rolls of toilet paper.
George was born in 1946 to Henry and Florence George in Milwaukee. He grew up in Milwaukee and studied history at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
He married Esther Ledesma in 1970 and had two children, Matthew and Rachel.
George is survived by his wife and children.
George began working in medical underwriting at Northwestern Mutual in 1970 and is viewed as one of the creators of the modern life insurance company medical underwriting discipline.
He later worked for Manulife, Lincoln National and ExamOne before starting his own business, Hank George Inc., in 2002.
He started On the Risk, the journal of the Academy of Life Underwriting, in 1985, and the International Underwriting Congress conference series in 1997. He started Hot Notes in 2000.
He wrote more than 500 research papers and articles, including some for the National Underwriter Co., which, like ThinkAdvisor, is a division of ALM Media.
