If your mother or any other female blood relatives have had breast or ovarian cancer in the past, your insurance rates could go up beginning next year. You might even lose your insurance all together.
When these women apply for life and critical illness insurance, the insurance industry wants to know if they have been checked for the BRCA1 or BRCA2 gene mutations. These problems with their genes make it more likely that they will get these cancers. But before insurance companies can put these questions on their application forms, they have to get permission from the Genetics and Insurance Committee. This is the group that advises the government on these and similar issues.
The Association of British Insurers (ABI) will ask the Committee for permission in the coming months to ask women if they have been tested positive for BRCA1 or BRCA2 gene mutations. These mutations are found in one out of every ten new cases of ovarian cancer and one out of every twenty new cases of breast cancer. About 1 in 850 British women inherit a bad BRCA1 gene. Of these women, 14–18% will get breast cancer at some point in their lives.
We found a notice on the Genetics and Insurance Committee's website that said, "The Committee expects that the Association of British Insurers will submit in late 2006/2007 four revised and updated applications for the use of adverse results from the predictive genetic tests of the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes (breast/ovarian cancer) to help determine insurance premiums for life and critical illness insurance."
So far, British insurance companies can only ask for the results of tests that look for Huntington's disease on their application forms. Even then, the question can only be asked if the applicant wants more than GBP500,000 in life insurance, more than GBP300,000 in critical illness insurance, or more than GBP30,000 in payment protection insurance. This rule was set by an agreement between the insurance industry and the government that is set to end in 2011. However, the Chairman of the ABI's Genetics Working Group, Harpal Karlcut, was quoted in the insurance trade magazine "Cover" as saying: -
"We hope to get approval for the breast cancer test by the end of the year. "The next conditions we will look at are the two breast cancers. After that, we don't see a reason to look at any other conditions." We do keep an eye out for diseases that might pop up in the future, but nothing else is coming up ". We add yet another important condition.
