Discriminatory travel insurance? Ours is up by 300% thanks to DS's CP

[laumiere]

DS1 has mild to moderate cerebral palsy and we're trying to get travel insurance for a two-week holiday in Spain. He's 3 so no wild parties!

Before we mentioned his condition the quote was £18, now it's £62. He doesn't have epilepsy and wouldn't need to haves special medical attention. So is it me or is this disablist? It was Direct Line.

[WetAugust]

No it's not discrimminatory. Insurance is based on an assessment of risk and the insurance company is entitled to increase the premium based on it's assessment of the (increased) level of risk posed by your DS's disabilities.

[WetAugust]

Ooops! beware - unnecessary apostrophe above -

[laumiere]

But that's the point, they're making assumptions about his disability that simply aren't true.

[meltedmarsbars]

Sorry but insurance is a risk-assessment issue.
We just go with the E111 now and get the insurance company to insure everything except things to do with dd2's disabilities (she is 7 so we've had several years of this). It takes some negotiation and I'm sure we'd need the insurance ombudsman if we ever had to claim, but our dd2 is effectively not insurable otherwise.

[r3dh3d]

Ikwym, but it's not disablist. Any more than insuring a young driver being more expensive is age-ist. The way that insurance works is by statistics that calculate risk based on the average for the group you are in. So the industry is "ist" by definition. They have to make assumptions or they'd be calculating individually for each person and the admin involved would put costs through the roof. Unfortunately, you're lumped in the bucket of "kids with CP" in the same way as a terribly sensible 19 year old is lumped in the bucket of "teenage drivers". And if "kids with CP" are, on average, claiming 4 times as much then your premium will be 4 times higher.

It's a bugger. I believe there are specialist medical insurers who may have the expertise to break the CP category down a bit and hence give you a lower quote based on a better understanding of the risk. Don't know off the top of my head I'm afraid. I read this a while back on an Epilepsy site, maybe someone else has more info?

[laumiere]

I've just gone with it this time as we're leaving on the 3rd, but am really hacked off with it. DS1 can walk, would poss need help if we were evacuating (but so would any 3 year old), but can't talk, but then if he needed to go to hospital we'd have to advocate anyway.

I'm just so cross, we'd never realised before that it would be a problem.

[TheDMshouldbeRivened]

there was an article about this in 'Disability Now' a few months back. Might be worth checking the back issues. They said it was disablist.

[twoisplenty]

Our ds has cp and epilepsy. He is 10yo. I did a quote online with Marks and Spencers nsurance. When it was time to put in details about the cp, it didn't up the quote. The quote shot up when I put the epilepsy in.

Wonder whether it's worth trying it? BTW we quoted for worldwide annual insurance, so can't comment about any other.

HTH

[twoisplenty]

One more thing! Doing the quote online with M&S, it asked whether I wanted to include the disability within the quote or not. So perhaps, because CP without any complications does not increase risk of illness or injury as such, you could have travel insurance without the CP included? THere is a phone number if you were unsure about it (I would be unsure to do this, I did put the cp in our quote).

[laumiere]

Damn twoisplenty, I may have to look that up! DS1 hasn't got epilepsy so I may cancel the Direct Line one! Thanks, more money for pedalos!

[twoisplenty]

Let me know how you get on? Hope it all works out for you.