Clearly, this didn’t help the industry at a time when mental health is one of the nation’s most widely discussed issues.
Was it a true and fair reflection of insurers and their treatment of mental health today?
Speaking recently at the LifeSearch Protection Awards, Tom Baigrie, founder and chief executive of LifeSearch, encouraged the insurer and broker audience to avoid arguing about the balance of The Guardian article and instead consider it “a call to action for us to review our approach and if necessary our prices so we can get to boast about how we treat those with mental health issues more fairly”.
He said the industry should lead in the assessment of mental health issues and offer demonstrably fair value to the one in four people who suffer some form of mental health problem in any year, as highlighted by the charity Mind.
“Do the questions we ask customers reflect that reality so as to properly determine real risk?” Mr Baigrie comments. “Do we find out enough about causes and outcomes or are we carrying too many negative assumptions from a time when mental illness was stigmatised?”
Phil Jeynes, head of sales and marketing at UnderwriteMe, believes the latter to be the case. “There’s definitely work to be done to align underwriting questions and rules with modern approaches to mental health,” he says.
“For example, most insurers ask if, in recent years, an applicant has suffered from stress. The follow-up questions quickly move into topics like suicidal thoughts and self-harm.
“It’s still a pretty blunt approach to a topic that affects all of us to some degree.”
Automation of underwriting has brought many benefits but one of the downsides, as pointed out by Andrew Gething, managing director of MorganAsh, is that many consumers with complex and difficult conditions such as mental health can feel alienated by the questions and process itself. Consequently, they abstain from taking out insurance.
“We often find when speaking to consumers with mental health issues that they feel they are uninsurable,” Mr Gething explains.
“When in fact once the condition is fully understood, the appropriate cover can be put in place. The industry has changed the questions numerous times, but in practice it is the answers that are the important part.”
Get it right from the get-go
It seems clear that getting the right information at the application – or initial underwriting - stage is key to getting more claims paid. This would largely avoid the risk of any suggestions of underwriting at claim, says Ian McKenna, director of the Finance & Technology Research Centre (F&TRC).
