The following is forwarded on behalf of beyondblue and the Mental Health Council of Australia:
Insurance is one area in which mental health consumers may face discrimination, both in their attempts to access insurance and in the handling of claims.
When you apply for life insurance, the insurer will assess the risk that you might make a claim in the future. This process is known as underwriting. Underwriting aims to make the cost of your insurance proportionate to the risk involved, and have people with the same or similar risk paying the same premium. Underwriting relies on the use of statistical data and actuarial estimates.
If you have experienced a medical condition, including a mental illness, whether or not that condition was disabling in the past, insurance companies will consider that you are statistically more likely to need to claim against your life, income protection or disability insurance in the future. This statistically greater likelihood of making a claim means that mental health consumers may experience difficulties in obtaining life insurance, income protection insurance or disability insurance. Insurers might refuse to insure you at all, or might offer you a policy with only limited benefits and/or at a higher premium.
The MHCA and beyondblue are interested in the experiences of people with a history of a mental illness relating to their applications and claims for insurance products. But to do this, we need your help in completing the questionnaire to tell us how people with mental illness are being treated by insurance companies.
The survey has less than 30 questions all of which are simple and relate to your experience when applying for insurance as well as the claims process if relevant. The survey shouldn’t take more than 10-15 minutes to complete, but your responses will enable us to gain more insight into any processes that we can work towards changing into the future.
To access the survey, participants will simply have to click on the link provided below.
All surveys completed will be anonymous and treated confidentially. We are using a commercial survey tool that uses Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) 256 bit encryption method. This is the encryption method used by the US government, including the US National Security Agency for classified top secret information.
For anyone wishing to complete the survey in hard copy, simply contact Rachelle Irving (rachelle.irving@mhca.org.au or 02 6285 3100) and she will send one to you.
We would appreciate you completing the survey as soon as possible although you will have an opportunity to complete it any time up until 23 August 2010 when we will have to close the survey. We will be publishing a report about the survey findings on our website but should you request it, we would also be only too happy to send you a copy of the results.
We thank you for taking the time to read this email, and now hope that you will now give us a few more minutes in completing the survey.
If you happen to have any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact Rachelle who will be only too happy to help you.
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