Vegetarians Given Life Insurance Incentive
Summary
An interesting new insurance product has been marketed by Animal Friends Insurance. The new policy offers cheap premiums to vegetarians, based on evidence that they are at a lesser risk than their meat-eating counterparts of developing certain illnesses. It remains to be seen whether other insurers will follow the new policy marketed by Animal Friends Insurance .
A none profit insurance firm has introducd an insurance plan which offers fish-eaters and vegetarians a reduced cost cheap critical illness insurance .
The deal, believed to be the first of its kind, is being pioneered by Animal Friends Insurance (AFI). The company is offering veggies a 6 per cent lower priceon mortgage cover premiums
The company said that veggies ought to pay a lesser cost for the product, which pays out if the customer dies, because they were less likely to suffer from a selection of serious conditions, including cancers.
Rebecca Puttey, the managing director of AFI, said that the risk of vegetarians being diagnosed with certain cancers is reduced by up to 42 per cent and the possibility of them suffering from heart disease is lowered by up to 32%, but despite this they have, until now, had to pay identical life premiums as people who eat meat.
She says that AFI believe this is patently unfair and says the insurance companies should acknowledge the fact that being a veggie can create have a positive influence on life expectancy and cut its monthly premiums accordingly.
A full-price policy is also on the market for meat eaters. Both plans are sold by LV=, which was previously known as Liverpool Victoria.
In common with standard life plans, a range of aspect contribute to the cost of the policies including whether the applicant smokes, their sex, weight and age.
Just at the moment, Animal Friends Insurance is funding the seven per cent price reduction itself from the payment it gets from LV=. In the future, however, the business’s aim was to offer lower premiums on specialist plans. In the company is hoping to sign up enough vegetarians to make it viable for LV= to underwrite yet another policy that takes the veggie diet into account.
Indeed there are worthwhile savings to be made, a forty two year oldnon-smoker buying £300,000 worth of cover might potentially save £393.60 over a 20-year period.
Where serious illness insurance is concerned, AFI considers that life insurance companies should begin to treat those that like meat and those that do not eat meat in approaches matching the way they approach those that don’t smoke and those that do. We hope that that other companies in the insurance industry will do something similar.
Some senior executivesin the insurance industry are dismissive that there is any proof that veggies live longer, and how any life insuranec company could prove that people who had certified that they were vegetarian did not sometimes enjoy the odd lamb chop.
When it comes to smoking, it’s true that there are your Doctor’s records - if you do smoke it’s probable that your Doctor is likely to know about it. However, this is unlikely to apply when it comes to eating meat, an an insurance industry spokesperson observed.
But some veggies contend that they are not concerned about people falling off the veggie way of eating and suggested that once a vegetarian has become a vegetarian, they do not regress to meat-eating, unlike applicants who smoke who tend to drift out and back again into their habit.
