One-third of insurance companies reject HIV-positive clients and 5 out of 27 refuse to insure cancer patients, according to Dmitry Yanin, Board Chairman of the International Confederation of Consumer Societies, who spoke on Monday at the roundtable meeting “Discrimination in the insurance industry: monitoring results.”
“Auxiliary insurance (when a customer takes out a loan at a bank and also buys insurance) is growing because the banks receive commission from insurance companies. Interestingly, the insurance market has been on the rise recently as 30% people believe that insurance is important. However, this market has a number of flaws as insurance companies often refuse to work with certain categories of customers,” the expert noted.
He added that the insurance companies refuse to provide services to pregnant women and HIV-positive customers because this requires individual contracts.
“One-third of the companies do not insure HIV-positive customers, AIDS patients and do not recognize HIV as an insurable event. Other companies will provide insurance to people with pre-existing HIV on special terms. We believe there are no grounds to consider this category of customers more expensive for the insurers. The situation is even more difficult when it comes to cancer patients as 5 out of 27 companies refuse to insure and 4 out of 27 do not recognize cancer complications as an insurable event,” Dmitry Yanin said.
He added that more than 25% of the companies refuse to insure people with disabilities while 8 out of 27 companies require special terms.
“One-third of the companies do not consider complications or death as a result of pregnancy as an insurable event,” the expert concluded and said that the situation needs to be changed.