The assisted suicide debate was elevated in the news earlier this year when Robin Stransham-Ford – a terminally ill cancer patient – won a ruling in the Pretoria High Court in which he was granted permission to take his own life with the aid of a doctor.
The assisted suicide debate was elevated in the news earlier this year when Robin Stransham-Ford – a terminally ill cancer patient – won a ruling in the Pretoria High Court in which he was granted permission to take his own life with the aid of a doctor.
The ruling stated that the doctor who would assist Stransham-Ford would not be criminally charged for the act. Ironically, he died hours before the ruling on 30 April 2015.
While this ground-breaking case raises many ethical and legal questions, one less-talked about potential implication is that of life cover. Will legal cases of assisted suicide differ to the current life cover clauses on “regular” suicide? Will life cover policies have to change in the future to take cases of legal assisted suicide into account? Sandy Govender, Head of Group Insurance at Momentum, sheds some light on this issue.
Current life cover clauses regarding “regular” suicide
“In the insurance world under group arrangements there is something called free cover limit (FCL),” explains Govender.
“Individuals in the group automatically qualify for cover up to the FCL. Where cover is compulsory, for example in group life cover through an employer, there are no exclusions on suicide up to the FCL. For individuals taking out cover above the FCL, suicide will only be covered up to the FCL until the full underwriting is approved for the higher amount, after which it will be fully covered.”
Govender says that, for individual policies where clients take out the policy on a voluntary basis, their suicide is not covered for an initial period from the commencement of the cover, ranging from 12 to 24 months, from the inception of the policy. Otherwise the full amount is paid.
“Suicide is only a risk to insurers if their client took out the policy knowing that once they committed suicide their beneficiaries would be covered. This is actually a rarity and the exclusion period would reduce any potential risk here.”
Assisted suicide vs “regular” suicide
According to Govender, in terms of life cover, assisted suicide is no different to the current life cover clauses on suicide.
“In most instances of medically assisted suicide, the client is terminally ill and will usually not have much longer to live. In this regard, they would in any case become a claim on our books in the near future. So assisted suicide is actually a lower risk than a healthy person committing suicide.
Most life insurance policies have the option to take out a terminally ill cover which allows for your life insurance benefit to be paid while the client is alive if the doctors says that the person has less than a certain period to live (typically 12 months). So this further reinforces why assisted suicide is not really an issue.”
“As we don’t see assisted suicide as a high risk, it is unlikely that life policies will change in the near future in this regard.”
