So would my life insurance policy pay out if I died from Coronavirus, or is it an act of God?
Unless you have an unusual life insurance policy, it would pay out.
“Act of God” is a legal term of art which refers to natural events like lightning strikes, floods, volcano eruptions, etc. Pretty much any life insurance policy would pay out if you perish in such an event.
There’s nothing special about caronavirus that would cause it to be treated differently than any other fatal disease in the context of a life insurance policy.
Iirc the only weird event that life insurance companies aren’t required to payout is if your city is hit by a nuclear weapon, though at that point I doubt anyone is there to collect anyway.
Many also have a suicide clause, but that generally expires after a year or two.
Not just nuclear weapons, but many (perhaps most) life insurance contracts don’t cover for death due to acts of war. I recall there being law suits about whether the deaths in 9/11 were due to acts of war.
I recall a case from some years ago in Paso Robles, Ca.
Like many residential neighborhoods, the streets are lined with trees, one alongside the street in front of each house. These trees are generally considered city property.
One day, after a rainstorm, one of these trees fell over on top of a parked car and crunched it. The car owner filed a claim against the city for the damage. The city (or maybe it was the city’s insurace company?) denied the claim, on the grounds that it was an “act of God” :dubious: and the court upheld that. :smack:
Well, yeah. That’s what an act of God is. The city isn’t responsible for a storm knocking down a tree, unless you can show they had been negligent in some way, such as refusing to remove a rotting tree that they were aware of. If the owner had comprehensive coverage on the car, they would probably pay out, tho.
What, then, isn’t an “act of God”? Anything and everything that happens can be written off as a “act of God”. A falling tree isn’t a hurricane, tornado, flood, or earthquake, the kinds of natural disasters that are commonly seen as “acts of God” in the context of insurance exclusions.
When Pharaoh hardened his heart and increased the burdens on the Hebrew slaves in ancient Egypt, even that was described as an act of God (Exodus 7).
There has been more litigation in the English-speaking world over falling trees than perhaps any other topic. Most of the time, if a tree falls, it isn’t anybody’s fault. That’s what “act of God” means. You can’t hold someone civilly liable for events triggered by natural events which are out of anyone’s control.
There is an exception, which is the duty of reasonable care. If your house falls down due to a mild gust of wind, that’s an act of God. But it doesn’t mean nobody is responsible, because houses shouldn’t do that. The builder is expected to follow building codes and use the correct materials, as any reasonable person would expect. If your neighbor’s tree has been rotting for years, and he knows it, and has been told it’s a danger, and he did nothing, then an act of God that knocks it over and caves in your roof may be actionable.
There’s a key difference between finding someone liable for damage (was the city liable for the tree falling over) and whether an insurance policy will pay for it.
There are two major kinds of insurance. First party insurance reimburses the owner of the policy when something bad happens to that person. Third party insurance reimburses damage to a third party. (The insurer is the second part in both cases.) So if I drive into your car, my third party liability policy will pay you because I damaged your car. If I don’t have insurance, your first party comprehensive/collision policy will pay you for your car.
If a tree fell on your car, and you have comprehensive insurance, your policy will pay for the damage. If it turns out that it’s someone else’s fault that the tree fell (it’s been visibly rotting for years, and should have been cut down) then your insurer might collect from the liable party (the owner who was negligent in not cutting down the tree) and you’d get back the deductible. But if it’s an act of God (that is, no one is responsible) then you are out the deductible. But your first party insurance still pays.
Life insurance is like first party insurance. It pays the people specified by the policy owner of the policy owner dies. There may be specific exemptions (no payment if you kill yourself right after buying the policy. No payment for acts of war.) But in general there won’t be a liable party, and deaths due to “acts of God” are routinely covered.
Insurance policies usually require you to take reasonable care. If you leave your iphone on a table and it gets stolen, the insurance may not pay out. The same applies if you leave your car on the street (or at a petrol pump) with the keys in the ignition.
I would guess that if you travel somewhere that your government is saying is hazardous, an insurance company might find that unreasonable. The question is - Is there a fundamental difference between life and general insurance?
In the US, life insurance and general insurance are regulated quite differently, and usually offered by different companies. They are more similar in many other countries.
Or, to look at it from another perspective:
Life insurance ordinarily covers SUICIDE after a 2 year waiting period. There is no carelessness that puts you more at risk of death than actively killing yourself. Yeah, it’s a covered cause if death under a US life insurance policy.
I don’t even know if China offers life insurance, but if they do (as a Godless nation) they can’t very well blame God now can they?
As others have indicated, I think you are drawing the wrong inference here. The significance is not whether an insurance company will pay, it is which insurance company will pay. Really the most important thing about falling trees is that the law should be clear and consistent, since it’s in nobody’s interest to have extended litigation every time. The most common approach is that if an apparently health tree is just randomly knocked down in a storm (that’s what “act of god” means), there is no liability, and the damage to property is covered by the insurance company covering the property; only if a property owner has (say) written to his neighbor pointing out a dangerous rotten tree on the neighbor’s property, and the neighbor fails to act, would there be liability, in this case the property owner’s insurance company would attempt to reclaim the payout from the neighbor’s insurance company.
The two biggest life insurance companies in the world and 3 of the top 4 are based in the PRC proper or Hong Kong, which might answer the first question. On the second the term that equates to ‘Act of God’ in translations of insurance contracts is often 天災, the two characters mean heaven-calamity. It can also be translated as just ‘natural disaster’. It’s common in traditional Chinese culture to refer ambiguously to heaven in particular or sometimes God, as per Confucianism which doesn’t believe there isn’t a heaven or a God, but just doesn’t deal with the issue specifically.
PRC public discourse has tended to revert to more traditional modes to some degree, and official atheism tends to manifest nowadays as just suspicion of organized religions not under CCP control (the mainline Catholic Church in China for example is, the Party has to OK bishops etc), not about traditional references to ‘heaven’.
In South Korea a plurality is Christian, probably a majority in the higher echelons of society, but the same Chinese term is used (or a related one) . It’s a just a turn of phrase anyway, ‘Act of God’.
And back to OP, life insurance policies not paying out for ‘Acts of God’ is pretty much unheard of AFAIK. That concept might apply in property/casualty or liability insurance, but usually I think in general contract law to say you can’t be sued for breaking the contract due to circumstances beyond your control, ‘Acts of God’ being the old fashioned legal term.
I don’t recall “Act of God” provisions when I wrote auto insurance software but that was decades ago. With “Acts of God”, aren’t churches, as God’s agents, and their insurers, liable? If not liable, then they’re really not linked to God, right? In which case they don’t qualify for religious tax exemptions. But the law grants them leave. US law could, but doesn’t now, classify diseases as divine, without assigning liability. Would that shutter the health insurers?
There is no life insurance policy in the world that doesn’t pay out because of “act of God”. That defeats the purpose of life insurance as almost all death can be written off as an “act of God”
The only reason your policy won’t pay while in force is if you willfully deceived the company when applying for the policy or if you commit suicide in the first two years (in the United States. Suicide may be excluded for longer in other countries).
Also, life insurance and Property and Casualty insurance (P&C) are very very different things. Very little translates from one to the other. They are both insurance but are similar in the way that surgery and psychiatry are both medicine.
I think “God” often serves a grammatical role independent of religion. In English, “It rains” is a form of speech used even by atheists who deny that there’s any “It” to be raining.
Anyway, “Force majeure” is the more general term than “Act of God.” IANAL but Wikipedia seems to think that excluded forces majeures (or Acts of God) need to be specifically enumerated in a contract.