About
24% of U.S. employers now offer some kind of critical illness insurance
benefits.
The U.S. market for a relatively new
supplemental health product, critical illness insurance, continues to grow.
Premiums from new sales of the product through
voluntary benefits and worksite marketing programs increased to $627 million in
2017, up 15% from the 2016 total, according to LIMRA.
The premium total for new critical illness
insurance sales was up from $544 million in 2016, and up from $294 million in
2014.
Analysts at LIMRA based the latest
critical illness insurance sales figures on results from the organization’s
latest U.S. Worksite/Voluntary Sales Survey. Forty-seven insurers participated
in the survey.
Analysts also found, based on data from a
different survey, that the share of employers offering critical illness
insurance benefits of some kind increased to 24% in 2017. That’s up from 23% in
2014, and up from 21% in 2009.
Critical illness insurance policies protect
the insureds against diseases and conditions specified in the policies. A
typical policy might pay a flat amount of cash to an insured diagnosed with a
triggering condition, such as cancer, a heart attack, or a stroke.
Many workers use critical illness insurance as
a supplement to major medical insurance.
Some people who cannot afford major medical
illness insurance try to use products such as critical illness insurance,
hospital indemnity insurance and accident insurance to compensate for lack
of major medical coverage.
When Affordable Care Act major medical
benefits requirements and underwriting rules took effect, in January 2014, the
rules expanded many people’s access to major medical coverage, but the rules
also led to an increase in deductibles, co-payments and coinsurance amounts for
many insured people.
Some speculated that the big increase in
out-of-pocket costs would boost demand for gap-filler products.
The new LIMRA figures suggest that workers
have been using critical illness insurance to fill in only a small portion of
their coverage gaps.
About 78% of full-time workers participating
in LIMRA surveys have said that they at least occasionally live paycheck to
paycheck, but only 38% of the workers offered critical illness insurance
take up the product, according to LIMRA analysts.
A full copy of the LIMRA critical illness
insurance update is available here.
Allison Bell, ThinkAdvisor's insurance editor,
previously was LifeHealthPro's health insurance editor. She has a bachelor's
degree in economics from Washington University in St. Louis and a master's
degree in journalism from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern
University. She can be reached at abell@alm.com or on Twitter at
@Think_Allison.
No comments:
Post a Comment