The tobacco free options may seem to be healthier but insurers are not seeing them that way.
While electronic cigarettes may be designed to mirror the smoking experience while removing the carbon monoxide, tar, and other chemicals and toxins that make tobacco one of the top cancer causers, life insurance companies continue to consider their users in the same way that they would a smoker of a traditional cigarette.
Many smokers have been trying to use e-cigarettes to break their nicotine addictions.
Quitting smoking is not an easy feat. Life insurance companies – and many other types of insurers – charge notably higher rates to smokers than to nonsmokers and while they will start to reduce rates for people who have quit, these discounts don’t apply when the individual is still smoking e-cigarettes, despite the fact that they don’t contain tobacco. The hope is that this device will prove to be a tool that will help a smoker to transition out of the need for smoking at all.
Life insurance companies have pointed out that the e-cigarettes still contain nicotine.
These devices could be helpful in the process of quitting smoking, but they don’t necessarily mean that the goal has been achieved, just yet. That said, they can’t be considered to be a guaranteed success, either. While many people find that they are far more helpful than products such as nicotine gum, inhalers, and others that are designed for quitting, there are still a large number of people who simply keep up the use of the e-cigarettes as a replacement for the tobacco based variety.
Indeed, they are lower in the number of substances that are actually being smoked, which does make them a “healthier” – or at least less toxic – option, but people who are using them as a tool to stop smoking tobacco cigarettes are still finding themselves using the electronic form a year or two later.
For that, among other reasons, despite the fact that a person may have been tobacco free for more than a year, when trying to purchase life insurance, the insurer will likely not consider that individual to be a nonsmoker, as long as e-cigarettes are still being used, and higher premiums will be applied.
Julie, I think insurers need to re-examine their policy in this regard. They are not properly analyzing the risk in the case of Nicotine Free E-Cigarette users.