I’ve certainly seen the “2-years delay for a suicide payoff” clause in policies I’ve had. No question there.
I’m curious about the serious disease, e.g. cancer, situation. It’s common now that folks live quite a few years with a diagnosis that’s in effect “100% terminal given current med tech, but just not right away.”
So imagine person X has serious cancer. As in, barring a miracle or new med tech, they’ll be dead almost for sure in 7 years, if not a lot sooner. After this scary diagnosis they apply for life insurance and lie comprehensively that they have no such disease.
Are you saying that if they do live past 2 years then expire shortly thereafter from their cancer that the insurance company grumbles, says, “Yup, you sure fooled us”, and pays off with no further repercussions? That sounds implausible to me; it leaves too much opportunity for scamsters.
Or does the industry have enough access to patient medical history that the applicant would be caught in the lie and the insurance never written? So they’d never get to the payout stage?
Exclusion periods for suicide are generally fixed by statute at either one or two years. Life insurers have for the most part moved away from other blanket exclusions; rather, they usually incorporate the cost of what used to be exclusions into the cost of the policy.
BTW, the insurance company doesn’t have to wait until you die. At any time during the first two years, they could contest the policy. Suppose they find out you’re getting chemo treatments and you lied on your application. They could drop you like a hot potato and refund all your premiums as soon as they find out, if it’s within the first two years. After the two years are up, it’s too late.
In cases like the one I linked to, i.e. a crystal-clear incident of suicide-by-cop despite the death certificate indicating “death by homicide,” can the insurer refuse to pay a claim on the basis that “the insured obviously intended to die, therefore we’re calling it a suicide”? In other words, can they assert a manner of death other than the one officially recorded on the death certificate? Or would that be grounds for a lawsuit by the listed beneficiary?
A bit of a tangent, but would an assisted suicide/euthanasia be a homicide to a coroner? Technically it’s one person (Dr. Kevorkian) killing another person but generally society calls that an unambiguous suicide.
Yes, the insurer can disagree with the manner of death on the DC, and in essence come up with their own manner of death. I’ve been involved in some tense discussions where that was going on. The impression I got was that it’s an up hill battle for the insurers to disagree with the DC, if the beneficiaries challenge them.
When Kevorkian pushed the button, that was clearly a homicide. When he set everything up and did everything but push the button, it’s a grey area. Some might say homicide, some suicide, as far as the DC goes. As far as prosecuting him, it seemed, IIRC, that it wasn’t until he pushed that that went forward.