Dying to insure

And what effect would assisted dying coverage have on the life insurance industry? The Society of Actuaries has published a thorough analysis of the impact of Oregon's DWDA on USA insurance companies. It calculated such a microscopic potential effect that it concluded there would be no "material impact on life insurance claim costs."

Therefore, even if one were to argue that the assisted death of a terminally ill individual - after careful consultation and deliberation - was 'suicide,' most Australian life insurance policies would still be due to pay out just as if the individual had died from what we usually refer to as suicide. Plus, it would have no material effect on insurers.

It was largely redundant then for the FSC to write to the South Australian Government to express 'concern' that the SA Bill doesn't refer to a death under its provisions as 'suicide', thereby subtly acknowledging that there was no 'suicide conflict' in law in the first place. (In fact it is a Private Member's Bill, not a Government one.)

Such was its reaction, it would be hard to imagine that the FSC doesn't already plan to instead try and persuade the Federal Parliament to add 'assisted dying' alongside 'suicide' as a permissible exclusion in Section 228 of the Life Insurance Act, even in the absence of significant benefit for insurers. If successful, Commonwealth law precedence would then protect insurer rights to expressly exclude life cover for assisted dying regardless of any State laws to the contrary.

But insurers would then be declaring to the Australian public, the overwhelming majority of whom want assisted dying choice legalised, that "we will pay out on the policy if you die in extremis from the horrific but 'natural' effects of your illness,or you are driven into pharmacological oblivion through terminal sedation until you die no matter how long it takes, or you starve and dehydrate yourself to death by refusing all interventions and sustenance, but we will not pay out if you die a lawful, peaceful, physician-assisted death in the same circumstances."

Good luck with the public relations exercise on that one.

In the meantime, Australians can see for themselves what a beat-up this report was: in the first instance concocting a pseudo-crisis about supposed conflicts in 'suicide' insurance law, in the second instance side-stepping the fact that most Australian life insurance policies currently cover suicide anyhow, and in the third instance ignoring independent analysis showing no significant effect for the life insurance industry after all.

What will be the next confected argument against assisted dying choicefor Australians in untreatable extremis? Just wait for it.