Major insurer will offer individual life insurance to people with HIV
Prudential Financial Inc., one of the nation’s largest life insurers, is set to announce that it will offer traditional individual policies to eligible people living with HIV.
For the first time, people with HIV who are otherwise healthy will be able to get life insurance — a sign that big financial firms are ready to take the risk, alongside signaling a growing recognition that HIV/AIDS has evolved from a death sentence into a chronic but manageable disease.
“With advances in the successful treatment of people with HIV, we are now able to offer this population the opportunity to apply for life insurance – a milestone we see as a significant step in the right direction,” Mike McFarland, vice president, said in a prepared statement.
The company did not reveal what a life-insurance policy would cost for a person who is HIV-positive, but released that the coverage comes in the form of a convertible 10- or 15-year term life insurance policies, which will be be offered to those who are HIV-positive but otherwise healthy. Convertible policies are able to be converted into a permanent life insurance policy.
People living with HIV/AIDS can’t legally be excluded from the “guaranteed issue” group life insurance policies offered by some employers, but those policies typically don’t pay out more than $50,000. A positive HIV test remains cause for automatic denial of higher-value individual term life insurance policies that require a medical review, insurance agents said.
This still goes for those with an undetectable viral load.
Prudential has partnered with ÆQUALIS, a financial services startup serving HIV-positive people. ÆQUALIS will provide information to consumers and insurance agents as well as manage the application process for Prudential.
“We have not yet seen the terms of the life insurance product being offered … but it seems like a fantastic development for people living with HIV in need of term life insurance,” said Scott Schoettes, HIV Project National Director of Lambda Legal. “Finally, an insurance company has realized that this is the right thing to do and that it is profitable from a business perspective to offer this product to people living with HIV. Now that there is one company out there doing this, it will encourage others to do the same when they see that there is money to be made in this market.”
Bravo Prudential!
