Also note that policies like this require ongoing maintenance payments, otherwise you forfeit past payments and benefits.

The problem with claiming that the life insurance market is a predictor for death statistics is that firms tend to keep the most important data and calculations used to derive their pricing schemes secret. The firm is only concerned with keeping to projections as far out as they can model.

The consumer has no real input into the model (except as a selector of alternatives) and therefore cannot obtain much knowledge about actual death statistics (except perhaps a near meaningless lower-bound).