This is the second in a series of articles analyzing term life insurance quote sites on the Internet. If you would like to view the first study, you may find it here. Additionally, thanks to the life insurance underwriting site for their kind sponsorship.

I am conducting these studies to build support for ACCURATE quoting from a broad range of carriers. Currently, the term life insurance quotes industry is rife with customer dissatisfaction, stemming mainly from the industry's dirtly little secret: the "MISQUOTE PROBLEM".

Here is what happens: You choose a company because the quoting site displays it as the lowest rate. Eight weeks later, you find out that you don't qualify for that rate because of your health history. Instead, you have been approved for a (often much) higher rate. If you had known this in advance, you would have chosen another company that used different underwriting criteria.

The easiest way to demonstrate this is to examine our hypothetical case:

Here is how the actual premiums offered by the insurance companies compare to the life insurance quotes returned by the sites -- Click here to see how we chose the sites.

Only Insurance Guide offers John any of the top three carriers, returning two out of three. QuickQuote includes underwriting guidelines in their software, but they are inaccurate, missing the important question on cholesterol ratio. Also, they lack some key competitive carriers.

InsWeb does a commendable job of accurately quoting; since our last study, they have upgraded their software to include cholesterol ratio. But they are lacking far too many competitive carriers to be considered a strong consumer term life insurance site. Our previous study also included InsureMarket, but they have since merged their site with InsWeb.

Quotesmith, Term4Sale and AccuQuote would all erroneously direct John to buy carriers whose rates have been understated. These sites merely return a list of life insurance companies and rates without screening for underwriting issues. AccuQuote asks a lot of underwriting questions, but then does not use the answers in providing the online quote. Quotesmith does provide accurate manual guidelines; unfortunately, few consumers will have the expertise or patience to wade through them.

Of course, this is only one case, though it illustrates the importance of both accurate quoting and carrier selection. A more detailed and general analysis can be found by clicking here. We will review Canadian life insurance in a future study of life insurance agents .