This seemed to me to be the general consensus and I’ve had this pretty cached. From the top of my head, e.g., one reason why is that you’re somewhat likely to develop preexisting conditions if you sign up for insurance later, and while the expected amount of money is the same in an efficient and honest market, to the extent you care about log money, you don’t want to invest money now and sign up for life insurance later because that loses you log-money in expectation. (This is generally why you might want to ever pay for insurance.) Another reason is that insurers might want to have older people pay higher premiums because they expect more adversarial selection from older people (the older you are, the higher portion of people similar to you is signing up because they suspect that something’s wrong with them).
This seemed to me to be the general consensus and I’ve had this pretty cached. From the top of my head, e.g., one reason why is that you’re somewhat likely to develop preexisting conditions if you sign up for insurance later, and while the expected amount of money is the same in an efficient and honest market, to the extent you care about log money, you don’t want to invest money now and sign up for life insurance later because that loses you log-money in expectation. (This is generally why you might want to ever pay for insurance.) Another reason is that insurers might want to have older people pay higher premiums because they expect more adversarial selection from older people (the older you are, the higher portion of people similar to you is signing up because they suspect that something’s wrong with them).
The first is encompassed by “sign up now, but only because thet you get coverage now” (that is, insurance against big bad outcomes).