If a product is offered to a group of people in society it should be offered to all, or at least a similar product adapted to the needs of the excluded group, this is also true for life insurance. However people living with HIV will more than likely have their life insurance application declined based on their status. Insurance companies consider people who are infected with HIV as too much of a risk to sell life insurance to, because the likelihood of the HIV positive person cashing in on their policy is greater.

The question one should ask is whether the insurance company is dismissing the life insurance application on sound grounds. Life insurance is an agreement between a person and a life insurance company. The specifics of the agreement may vary, but the bases is that, the life insurance policy holder, pays the life insurance company premiums (amount of money on a periodic basis), in exchange for a lump sum of money on the event of the death (or permanent disability) of the policy holder. It is different than a savings plan, in that if the person takes out life insurance to the value of R 500 000 and dies after 2 years of taking out the life insurance policy, the insurance company must pay out the R 500 000 irrespective of whether the premiums paid until then match R 500 000. This is why the insurance company wants to make sure that the person pays enough premiums long enough to match the amount of insurance taken out.

You can see why, many life insurance companies do not want to take on the risk of insuring people living with HIV. However many things have changed over the years with regards to the treatment of HIV and the life expectancy of HIV positive people. HIV is no longer the death sentence it used to be in the past, with HIV positive people giving a few short years to live. HIV is now seen as a chronic long term disease which can be managed. The life expectancy of someone who is newly diagnosed with HIV and has no symptoms has an average life expectancy of 24 years, this is a massive jump from the previous 7 year life expectancy. The life expectancy rate has increased as the years have progressed and therefore we can be realistically optimistic to expect that the rate will continue to increase as the years go by, and as medication improves. We can also assume that we are closer to a cure for HIV than what we were 20 years ago.

A person infected with HIV can live a long and productive life, and should have the right to buy life insurance to protect their families just as anyone else would. Fortunately there are more and more life insurance companies such as AllLife, who are progressive and offer life insurance products to HIV positive people. Nobody can calculate when they are going to do, a HIV positive can very well outlive many HIV negative people, and should be entitled to life insurance.

For mroe information on life insurance, go to http://www.alllife.co.za