While being healed from cancer, Yaiza Cumelles received a call to offer her life insurance. “Yes, I’m interested,” she said. The commercial then asked him what he was doing, if he was working. “I answered no that I was being treated for cancer at the time. She simply replied, “Okay, good day and thank you”. And he hung up,” the young woman recalls. Cumelles was 21 at the time, and now, at 30, he claims the situation hasn’t changed at all. “I don’t even think about it with banks, mortgages or insurance. Because I already know the answer,” he says.
Cumelles’ experience, which he shared this week in a Twitter thread that went viral, illustrates the barriers people with a history of cancer face when trying to get life or health insurance. The complicated treatment and vital risk involved in the disease have long-term consequences for the daily lives of these patients. Therefore, they claim their right to oncological oblivion. Not the right for the rest of the population to forget them, but for ensuring that their illness no longer affects their chances of getting insurance or a mortgage. “The right to be forgotten consists essentially in the fact that ten years after the last treatment – five in the case of minors – and the cancer has been overcome, the fact of having undergone it is not an exclusion criterion when filling out the form and certifying that you have the disease had,” explains Cumelles.
Did you know that you can’t have life insurance, a mortgage, or a loan after you’ve been diagnosed with cancer?
I explain what the right to oncological oblivion is 👇— Yaiza Cumelles (@YaizaCumelles) March 28, 2023
83% of leukemia patients or ex-patients between the ages of 18 and 35 stated that they had difficulties in taking out life insurance. 78% have experienced it with fatalities. This is data from the study “Adolescents and Leukemia: Beyond Survival,” conducted last year by the Josep Carreras Foundation, for which they interviewed 295 young people who had or had had the disease. The report also reveals barriers to accessing housing: 44% of those trying to get a mortgage had some difficulty, and 33% had difficulty getting rental housing. Half of those surveyed said they had difficulties applying for a loan.
The European Parliament includes oncology’s right to be forgotten in a 2022 resolution, specifically Resolution 124, in which it marks 2025 as the limit for countries to incorporate the right to be forgotten for people with cancer into their legislation. The aim is to prevent insurers and banks from considering the medical history of patients when applying for a loan, buying a house or taking out life insurance. National regulations must ensure “that cancer survivors are not discriminated against compared to other consumers”. Within two years, all Member States must guarantee the right to be forgotten for all European patients “10 years after the end of treatment” and at the latest “five years later for patients diagnosed before the age of 18”. .
In Spain there are similar precedents to the European proposal, such as the reform of the Insurance Contracts Law in 2018 (Law 4/2018) to include that “people living with HIV/AIDS or other health problems shall not be discriminated against”, although this is the case it is not specified which conditions these are. However, Carlos Lluch, insurance broker and associate of the Association of Financial Users (ASUFIN), defends that the companies dedicated to personal insurance do not comply with these conditions and denounces the discrimination resulting from the procedure not only of patients with cancer, but also for people with disabilities or in a vulnerable situation. “These practices are downright illegal,” he says. “If you look for information on one of their websites that states in advance and objectively the conditions that apply to you, for example if you have cancer, you won’t find it,” he says.
In the case of mortgages, it has never been compulsory to take out life insurance, but it is advisable to apply for it. “The people who made it did it in worse conditions than the others. With a very high policy that covers almost nothing and doesn’t pay you in the event of death,” says Cumelles. “That’s what ends up happening, or that data is denied or corrupted in order to obtain it,” Lluch continues. In some cases of the death of a person with cancer who was not questioned or, if answered, chose to lie about their medical condition in order to obtain it, the bank refuses to enforce it.
My mother took out a loan after overcoming cancer. The bank did not conduct a health survey and took out whole life insurance for this loan. Two months later my mother died and the bank refused to pay the insurance https://t.co/VTnZ0wcqFH
— Jack the Lumberjack (@EvaMartin1998) March 30, 2023
For Lluch, a possible defense for consumers and users is to contact the Spanish Data Protection Agency and report that they have requested unnecessary information. “The data protection legislation states that the data requested and kept must be relevant, that is, they must be adequate and substantial,” he specifies. For example, in personal insurance, for years it has not been possible to ask whether you are a man or a woman, and the price of the tariffs must be the same for both. “But why are you asking then? If you can’t discriminate based on health, why ask for this data?” asks the insurance broker, emphasizing the logistical work of associations and politicians to ensure compliance with the law.
The constant obstacles in these procedures tire Cumelles. “I don’t know when they’ll get around to that or if they’ll do more to prevent discrimination than just adding an anti-discrimination law that isn’t applied in practice,” says the young woman. Spain is one of the three EU countries, along with Iceland and Malta, that have not yet regulated the right to be forgotten. The young woman insists: “Beating cancer and only finding closed doors makes you wonder if it was really worth fighting so hard.”
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