It’s that time of year: health insurance renewal and qualification for a monthly discount. For our health insurance, it’s a biometric screening and a written health assessment.

I am never a fan of the health assessment; it’s a series of far too many nosy questions that just assume you’re fat, lazy, don’t take care of yourself, smoke, drink too much, and have a lousy outlook on life. The questions are written in a way that assumes you need improvement. Instead of “do you smoke?”, it asks “how often do you smoke?”

I understand the questions may be written for brevity. It’s quicker to ask “how often do you smoke?” and select the range that applies (including options like “I don’t smoke” or, in my case, “I quit smoking more than a year ago” — in actuality, much longer) than to ask “do you smoke?” and then drill down another answer if the answer is “yes”. Nearly all of the questions are written this way. And while it’s more economical to write them that way, it’s also fairly abrasive. By the time I finished the health assessment, I felt like I’d been through an interrogation.

Also, many of the questions are leading in nature, such as asking what you plan to do to improve in each area. I also know these questions are designed because there are services the company provides to assist in various areas of life, although I also think they are very cut and dry.

The end results? I’m pretty much on my deathbed, according to them. I could be an Olympian and not get a perfect score with an insurance company.

I know, without a doubt, that I’m now going to get nagged by their various program offerings. That includes dietary information; I could tell by the slant of the questions that their preferred method of weight loss is NOT how I have managed to lose nearly 200 pounds. There’s no allowance for differing viewpoints. It spewed out my BMI, of course. It showed me how much weight it thinks I should lose. In its robot way, it sees me exactly as if I never did anything to improve my health.

Mind you, this health assessment was done after I had already consulted with my doctor, who did not tell me one single thing that needs improvement; I am the one who knows I still have work to do, as I admitted last week. It’s almost as if the insurance company prefers to second guess the guy with a medical degree that had me standing right in front of him.

I refuse to see myself as the insurance company does: something to be changed, by their rules, not an individual. The irony is that as I continue to follow my own path, I look better to my insurance company. I appreciate the differences: the health insurance information sees me as data input/output. My doctor sees me as a total person.

It’s important for me, the one being assessed in either situation, to also see all of me — the one who already has direct experience in what needs to change, how those changes need to happen, and when.