The key to creating income protection (IP) products for sickle cell sufferers may lie with learnings from similar solutions for people living with HIV.
However, this will not be possible unless the protection insurance sector comes together to learn more about the condition to try and find a way forward, according to Alan Knowles, co-managing director at Cura Financial Services.
Knowles (pictured) explained that while carriers of the sickle cell gene can generally secure IP cover, currently there is little availability of IP cover for people actually living with sickle cell.
He and his wife and co-managing director Kathryn, met with Dr Sheun Oke who has been campaigning for the development of such products – a campaign insurer Zurich has engaged with.
They discussed with Oke options available such as group cover through an employer or through certain income protection providers which do offer cover with an exclusion.
But Alan Knowles added these would have quite a high acceptance criteria leaving some sufferers seeking short term renewable accident and sickness policies.
Creative approach needed
One of the main issues currently is there is not a big enough demographic to support a specific sickle cell policy, but a solution may lie with how HIV income protection products have been developed.
“In South Africa there’s millions of people living with HIV so they have specific HIV-related income protection policies and life insurance policies,” Knowles said.
“But in the UK, we have only got about 100,000 people living with HIV so there’s not enough numbers to warrant a specific policy.
“But what we did do with HIV is we met with reinsurers, we met with underwriters, we met with insurers and we’re now in a position where we have got more than one insurance company offering long term income protection for people with HIV, so what we took was a change in stance to review data.
“When we looked at HIV, we talked about the lack of data available for insurers to base their decision on; millions of diabetics have got data but they didn’t have the data in the UK for people living with HIV. It’s the same with sickle cell.
“What they did with HIV is they almost used diabetes as a proxy condition and asked: Where are the similarities? Where are the differences? Can we apply the same sort of logic that we do for a diabetic to what we do with a HIV?
“That’s what’s needed here. What we need to do is find a similar condition where we do cover, look at the similarities, compare them and ask what can we offer.”
Knowles added that in his experience the problem with sickle cell is that sufferers can experience crises, time in hospital and prolonged issues which spooks insurers.
“That’s what insurers will be fearful of and other conditions that could arise related to that,” he continued.
“So the challenge the insurers will have is – do they put the price up? Do they exclude the condition? Do they do a combination of the two?
“But to me the answer is they need to try and learn more about the condition to be able to underwrite and try and find a way forward with it.”