CMI Working Paper 167

Working Paper 167 as published in January 2023.

This paper investigates the experience of accelerated critical illness by cause of claim, based on non-rated term assurance policies for the years 2017 to 2020, with the aims of assessing whether:

• Causes of claim vary by risk factors in the dataset.
• The cause-specific diagnosis rates, derived in Working Paper 151, still appear to provide a good fit to claim rates.
• Causes of claim were affected in 2020, when term assurance claims were substantially affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, by comparing experience by month.

The analyses show:

• At an overall level, cancer experience by month appears to follow a decreasing trend in 2019 and falls markedly between January and April 2020. There is an upwards trend in experience thereafter, to the end of 2020. There is a spike in deaths experience in April 2020 and monthly experience appears to remain elevated thereafter, compared with the corresponding experience in 2019, except in August and September and 2020.
• The cause-specific diagnosis rates derived in Working Paper 151 generally remain a good fit to the more recent dataset. The notable exceptions are the experience of both female non-smoker cancer and male non-smoker heart attack claims, which are light.

There are two outputs that accompany this paper:

• A Tableau Workbook, allowing interactive exploration of selected charts in the working paper. Note that this requires access to Tableau Reader; this is free to download at: https://www.tableau.com/products/reader.
• A spreadsheet that includes the values underlying the charts in the working paper.