Can I get Life Insurance After Breast Cancer 2023

When you have had breast cancer it can be difficult to know where to turn for things like life insurance. What information will the insurers want? What kind of terms are you going to get? Which insurer is best?

There’s a lot of factors that will determine the best life insurance and best insurer for you. Let’s take a look at some of the main parts of getting life insurance. 

When you apply for life insurance in the UK, most insurers will ask if you have ever had cancer. This will then lead to some extra questions if you have had breast cancer. Some of these questions will be to you and some will be for your GP.

The insurer is going to want to know

• When were you diagnosed with breast cancer?
• What type of breast cancer did you have?
• What was the staging and grading or TNM score of your breast cancer?
• What treatment did you have?
• How long did your treatment last?
• When did your treatment for breast cancer end?

This final question here is an interesting one. Most of the time insurers will want you to have finished chemotherapy and other treatments, before they can consider your application for life insurance.

Taking tamoxifen is different. You might hear that if you are still undergoing treatment you can’t get life insurance and it’s important to know that tamoxifen is an exception and is unlikely to stop you getting the cover.

It is really useful to have as much information as possible to hand, when you speak with an adviser, so that we can do thorough research for you from the start. As an example, there can be quite a difference between life insurance options for people that have had carcinoma in situ, compared to someone that had triple-negative breast cancer.

The staging and grading of your breast cancer will strongly influence the right insurer to put your life insurance application with. 

It’s not pleasant to go back through all the details but if you have any specialist letters detailing the breast cancer, it can really help to figure out the best life insurer and potential pricing that you can access for life insurance. It might also mean that your life insurance application is accepted without medical reports.

Medical reports are a form that your GP fills in that confirms details of your breast cancer, your treatment and your overall health now. The insurer is only allowed access to this information with your expressed permission.

The insurer will pay your GP for completing the report and once it is sent to the insurer they will be able to decide what terms of life insurance they can offer you.  

The tricky thing is that completing these forms is on top of GPs usual workloads and it can take a while for it to be done. It can be a matter of days, we have seen one take over a year. On average it is about 8 weeks for the medical report to be completed by your GP. This is why any specialist letters you have can be really useful as it might speed up the process of getting official accounts of your breast cancer to the insurer.

Premiums Can Be Priced In Two Ways

There are two ways that life insurance premiums are changed due to health conditions. Depending upon your breast cancer type and the time since your diagnosis and treatment, you might get standard terms for life insurance.

But there are times that the life insurance premiums will increase. This can add to the complication as to the best life insurer for you.

The first way that premiums are increased is by a percentage. It helps by giving an example here. Let’s say that the monthly premium is £5 per month for the life insurance that you need. This is known as the basic premium, it’s the price that anyone would pay that is your age and wanting that amount of life insurance.

An insurer might decide that you can have life insurance with them at what we call a +50 rating. This means that they increase your premium by 50% because you have had breast cancer.

So £5 per month becomes £7.50 per month for the life insurance.

This isn’t too big a jump when the premiums are low, but it can feel more intense if the starting basic premium is higher. The percentage can go higher than 50% depending upon the breast cancer that you had.

If you do have an increase to your policy premium it’s a really good idea to review your insurance options every year, to check if you are now at a time where the insurer can offer standard terms for life insurance.

The other way that life insurance premiums change is called a per mille rating. This is very technical and I won’t go into all the ins and outs of it here. It basically means that the insurer increases your life insurance premium for every £1,000 of life insurance that you take out. This is the rating type where you hear the stories of people being told that they need to pay silly prices for life insurance.

If you are told that your life insurance premiums are increasing through a per mille rating, you might feel that you simply cannot afford it and walk away from the insurance. The key thing to remember is that the premium will be high due to the amount of insurance you are taking out. If you reduce how much life insurance you apply for, the premiums will significantly drop.

The Best Insurer

There is unfortunately no particular insurer that is great for people that have had breast cancer. Each insurer will assess breast cancer differently and they will also assess the type of cancer, your staging and grading, and treatment differently too.

It’s really essential that research is done to make sure that your life insurance application is placed with the right insurer, to match your specific circumstances. Insurers change over time too. Every now and then insurers change the way that they assess different health conditions and you might find that an insurer is great for you now, but when you review your life insurance in the future they turn out not to be the best.

Europe is Different

Something interesting that has happened in Europe is that people now have the right to forget cancer. This means that insurers are not allowed to ask about cancer that has happened more than 15 years ago, in some countries the timing is less than this.

This is being done under what is known as ‘Right To Be Forgotten’ rules. This is generally improving the life insurance options for people that have had cancer in the past particularly with travel insurance, but there are some potential negative outcomes from this approach and it has not yet been adopted in the UK.

Our award winning advisers will ask you about all the things that we need to know to find the right insurer for you. We are here to search the market for you, to do all the donkey work, to make sure that you get the best terms for life insurance