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Comment by patrickhogan1 | Hacker News Reader

Strange question but how does this affect life insurance? Typically a suicide would not be covered.

Not sure how it works in Canada, but in the US I think most life insurance actually does cover suicide. There's usually just a stipulation that suicide isn't covered if it happens immediately after someone signs up

I could be wrong, but I think that term life insurance usually pays out but a whole life policy doesn't. At least that's been how my policies were.

CHLIA (the Canadian Health and Life Insurance Association) does not treat MAID as suicide. In addition, most plans cover suicide after two years of coverage regardless.

Thank you - this is helpful! It exempts it.

Wondering this myself, insurance in the states already tries to weasel out of every single charge if possible.

Does the ill person have a premium/annual plan?

That was implied, yes.

Then it would be worthwhile to keeping them alive for as long as the premium is being paid

...

Amazing! You've figured out insurance!

I would think it's like committing suicide, so no payouts. (in America)

From a morbidly capitalistic point of view, insurance companies should rejoice at the prospect of a very ill person opting for assisted death. I imagine the procedure to end ones life would be much cheaper than multiple years of procedures and medicine to keep them alive.

And if this is the case (which I don't actually know for sure, I'm just speculating), then insurance companies would be incentivized to 'nudge' certain people towards this decision, which is a super duper slippery slope, and at the extreme end you'd have the Rick and Morty dead people spaghetti planet situation.

edit - this of course applies only to people that would have the procedures and medicine that would keep them alive covered.

This is true in health insurance but not true in life insurance. Life insurance policies pay out at time of death with certain exclusions. Common exclusions are death by: suicide, killed while committing crime, killed by policy holder beneficiary.

Therefore, the longer one lives, the benefit accrues to the insurance co, because the more premium policy holder pays to LifeInsuranceCo (LIC), LIC has more time to earn interest/investment profits from those premiums, and the cheaper the payout from LIC to policy holder beneficiary, because of inflation and since most payout amounts (eg $1M) are fixed at time of policy issuance.

> From a morbidly capitalistic point of view, insurance companies should rejoice at the prospect of a very ill person opting for assisted death. I imagine the procedure to end ones life would be much cheaper than multiple years of procedures and medicine to keep them alive.

This would make sense if life insurance and health insurance were covered by the same insurer, but they rarely are.

The more fundamental problem here is that insurance is a) to prevent financial hardship b) in the case of a rare event. Neither death nor serious illness are rare events for the elderly, and more often than not, health insurance fails to prevent financial hardship, so both of these fail as insurance in these situations.

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