As part of prudent underwriting principles, can life insurers ask a prospect for genetic information?
I might guess it is not an issue of immediate priority for the insurance industry in India. There are several medical, ethical and legal issues that need to be sorted out first. How do you – as a life insurer – view the AIDS threat and what steps can insurers take to protect themselves? Can a life insurer exclude the risk of death due to AIDS from the policy purview? The number of HIV positive people among the Indian population is rising and this certainly draws our close attention. There are two stages to be taken care of – detecting the infected at application for insurance stage and managing the risk of worsening experience arising out of some existing policyholders getting infected. To a large extent the former can be reasonably assessed through segmentation and underwriting. For the second we continuously monitor the experience and there are several ways to control the risk including revising charges, having margins in pricing and so on. Controlling the exposure to mortality throu
