Life Insurance companies ask questions about sexual behaviour

Tue, 23 Aug 2005

Questions about an applicant’s sexuality often led to discrimination against gay men, in particular. Now life insurance companies will stop asking such questions.

Application forms for life insurance specifically ask what the applicant’s sexual orientation is. If a male wishes to declare himself as gay, the insurer would require the applicant to take an HIV test to proceed with the application.

The end of September will see application forms asking a different question: ‘In the last five years have you been exposed to the risk of HIV infection?’ The question relates more to behaviour than sexuality.

Last October, the Association of British Insurers issued a best practice statement for HIV and insurance. The statement recognises that being gay doesn’t mean a person is a higher risk of HIV infection and states: ‘The person concerned may be celibate, or may always have protected sex.’ It also states an insurer can only ask the applicant for an HIV test if they have a good reason. The reasons are predefined and must be made available to the applicant on request.

One company that is changing its policy is Norwich Union Life. Tony Jupp, chief underwriter said that gay men were initially seen as a higher risk of contracting the HIV virus: 'We accept that the world changes, so from the end of September we will be changing out stance from asking people about their sexuality and towards their behaviour patterns'. It will mean that whether you are male, female, gay, heterosexual, 20 or 50 years old, you will still be asked the same question.

Peter Tatchell, of the gay human rights group OutRage! welcomes the move, but adds: 'It's taken an unbelievably long time for the insurance industry to remedy this homophobic discrimination. The intrusive and discriminative questions and often inflated premiums for gay men were brought in as a panicked, knee-jerk reaction in the early 1980s.

Insurance chiefs lumped all gay men together in a category marked promiscuous and high risk of HIV, ignoring the fact that some are celibate, many are in long-term, monogamous relationships and most stick to safe sex, which carries little or no risk of HIV infection.

However, Norwich Unions Tony Jupp stated that applicants who may be tempted to lie about their exposure to HIV may be caught out as: We will still be carrying out random HIV tests when the sum assured reaches a predetermined figure. If someone makes a conscious decision not to answer a question truthfully and the worst happens within a short space of time, we do look carefully at early claims.
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