Waiting period from diagnosis for mortgage insurance issued to cancer survivors

When we talk about cancer patients, we often think that they have a lower survival and a reduced life expectancy compared to the general population. They also often find it more difficult to take out a loan or a life insurance because banks and insurance companies charge higher prices or even refuse to lend them money. However, thanks to progress in medicine, prognosis of many types of cancer has greatly improved over the last decades. This PhD thesis consists of three main topics, all in the context of cancer research. First, using tools from biostatistics and actuarial sciences, we estimate the time after which cancer patients can be considered as cured. Second, we aim at adapting the actuarial pricing of life insurance products depending on the type of cancer and the duration of survival at the time of application. Last, we compute the risk of developing cancer for a healthy individual, and the number of years of life lost due to cancer given that the patient already survived some years after diagnosis. Some European countries have implemented the “right to be forgotten” in insurance, that is, the right for a client seeking a loan not to declare a previous cancer after at most 10 years after a successful treatment. In Belgium, the waiting period opening the RTBF is currently 8 years, and it will be reduced to 5 years in 2025. In this PhD thesis, we show that for some cancer types, survival is similar to that of the general population only after a few years after diagnosis, supporting the fact that the waiting period can be further reduced. More importantly, we also promote a waiting period starting at the time of diagnosis and not at the end of the treatment to avoid any dispute in case of death. We use data from the Belgian Cancer Registry on melanoma, thyroid and female breast cancers as examples, but we hope that this research will pave the way for other cancer types, and even for other chronic diseases such as HIV, hepatitis or leukemia.