X-Message-Number: 27145
Date: Wed, 28 Sep 2005 11:01:49 -0600
From: 
Subject: On the Future of Life Insurance

Here's a question for the professionals:  When a life insurance policy pays 
out on a missing person case, which person has been declared dead though no 
dead body has been located, and that person turns up alive a few years 
later, does the money have to be paid back?  It seems logical that the 
answer to that question would also answer the situation of a legally dead, 
cryopreserved person, on whom life insurance has paid the benefit, being 
brought back to life.

As to the future of life insurance relative to cryonics, it seems 
illuminating to point out that as medical technology finds solutions to 
more and more causes of death, which for a while give rise to the 
feasibility of reanimating cryonics patients in order to apply those cures 
to them, it would not be long before there would be very infrequent need 
for cryonics at all, because those same technologies will be applicable to 
people before they need experience death in the first place.

By the time cryonics, and advanced technology that can repair nearly all 
illnesses and injuries, become mainstream, the insurance companies will be 
dealing with two services, which might even be combined into one 
policy:  (1) the current life insurance types, with very long actuarial 
tables, and (2) insuring against the need for cryonics suspension at 
all.  As time goes by, the increasing infrequency of the latter would make 
it less expensive premium-wise.  And as actuarial tables lengthen, the 
premiums naturally go down.

One thing I think we can be sure of, though:  the life insurance industry 
at all levels, loves your money, and will find a way to sell you something 
in exchange for it.  And it will be on their terms to ensure a 
profit.  Temporary glitches like "people who come back to life" 
will  be  on the order of small, isolated incidents, and will merely serve 
to catalyze changes in contract terms and pricing.

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