The insurer has now opened up its 10 year and 15 year individual convertible term life products to these patients.
Prudential has now announced that it will offer life insurance products to people who have been diagnosed with HIV, becoming the first major provider who is covering people who have received this diagnosis.
The insurance policies are offered as a reflection of the longer, healthier lives HIV patients are living.
The life insurance policies that are being offered to Prudential’s HIV positive customers include 10 year and 15 year convertible term products. This new offering from the insurer is a response to the new typical prognosis for HIV patients, as the disease is no longer considered to be a death sentence. Instead, people who have been diagnosed can continue to live longer and healthier lives than ever before. The reason is that people who are infected are benefiting from new and more effective drugs that can extend their lives by decades at a time, despite the fact that they have the virus.
Prudential has therefore decided that it is appropriate to offer certain life insurance products to people with HIV.
According to Prudential Individual Live Insurance chief underwriting officer, Mike McFarland, “As medical technology advances, we continuously evaluate and update our underwriting criteria, which has resulted in our ability to offer insurance to people dealing with various medical or chronic conditions.”
McFarland also pointed out that it was “four or five years ago” that Prudential first recognized that there was potential to be able to include people with HIV among their customers. However, at that time, the company had not yet developed a reliable way to be able to calculate and individual’s mortality data. Therefore, at that point, they had an idea but were not yet able to act upon it through offerings to customers.
It was shortly after that point that financial services company, Aequalis, which works to provide insurance to people living with HIV, partnered up with Prudential in assembling enough data to be able to build the type of statistical foundation the life insurance company required in order to create projections for people with HIV and, therefore, to offer them products.