Discovery Life has announced that it paid claims to the value of R8.4 billion across both Group Risk and Individual Life policies in 2023.
According to the company, it paid R6.45 billion in claims for individual life policies. This consisted of 8,912 unique claims, which included R3 billion in death claims.
Discovery Life Claims Experience held a media virtual round-table, where it said R1.5 billion was paid through the Severe Illness Benefit, R1 billion under the Capital Disability Benefit, R613 million under the Income Continuation Benefit and R298 million under various other benefits.
This brings the total value of claims paid under individual life policies to over R53 billion to date, it said.
Discovery Life deputy CEO Gareth Friedlander said in the two years after the Covid-19 pandemic, the group saw the impact of the sharp decline in health screenings translating into a spike in late-stage cancer diagnoses.
As a group, we have invested heavily post-pandemic in supporting a return to health screenings, the results of which are now evident in the 2023 data with a 29% increase in earlier-stage cancer claims compared to 2022. The importance of this is that earlier detection can lead to much better prognoses.
Later-stage cancers are still significantly high, at 31% of all cancer claims. But as a proportion of all cancer claims, less severe claims have increased showing that these are being picked up earlier, said Friedlander.
He said it was also worth highlighting that the total amounts the company paid through all living benefits were higher than what it paid towards mortality claims, which highlights the relevance of comprehensive and full body cover.
51% of the total claim amount paid in 2023 for the four main benefits highlighted above was paid under living benefits.
On average, the industry pays about 22% in living benefits, while Discovery Life tends to pay a higher proportion for illness, disability, and loss of income claims.
This is because clients are rewarded with richer Shared-value benefits when they add more of these ancillary benefits. This in turn also assists clients in reducing their disability and income insurance gap, Friedlander said.
He said the company's 2023 claims experience shows that one in five life cover claimants had already claimed for a life-changing illness or disability before they passed away.
According to Friedlander, Discovery Lifes Shared-value payments were now growing faster than the claims pay-outs.
This is a paradigm shift from the traditional insurance model as clients are deriving significant value from their life policies through healthy behaviour whilst being comprehensively protected for bad times, he said.
Discovery said Claims under its Lifes Global Education Protector have been steadily increasing, with R69 million paid towards education costs in 2023, up almost 30% from the prior year.
This increase is because of a higher education inflation index coupled with an increase in the number of claimants, it said.
Discovery head of claims and service Sylvia Steyn said the company was in the business of paying claims as long as people are honest when they are taking up the insurance.
It's genuinely material, medical non-disclosure, we can say a lot told us about very serious conditions, where if they'd come in at application stage and want to tell us about it, we made a revision to cover or we might have added some sort of exclusion, which leads to the claim being declined.
She said consumers need to be honest on their applications about their occupation and how they may travel extensively, as those will have an impact on the type of benefit that might be offered.
