Go to Israel or retain your life insurance? Often, you can do one or the other, but not both.
A bill preventing insurance companies from revoking the policies of people who plan to visit Israel passed through the state Senate’s Insurance Committee on Wednesday. Similar bills have already passed in Illinois, New York and Washington. The bill will next come to a full-floor vote before the assembly.
Currently, a number of life insurance companies have been known to cancel policies if the holder visits or plans to visit a country on the State Department’s warning list. Since the outbreak of the second intifada, Israel has often found its way onto that list, along with nations such as Kenya, Indonesia and Nepal.
Jonathan Bernstein, regional director of the Anti-Defamation League, met with state Sen. Jackie Speier (D-San Francisco/ San Mateo) prior to her introduction of the bill, known as SB1105. He said that insurance companies have yet to produce any tangible evidence that policyholders traveling to Israel, Indonesia or Nepal are at any greater risk than the general public.
“They can’t tell me if it’s a greater risk to travel to Israel than to West Oakland,” he said. “What this legislation would effectively do is force the insurance companies to look at [individual] countries, come up with actuaries and determine, in some way, the degree of danger. They’re not doing their homework. We’re asking them to do that rather than just look at the State Department Web site.”
Last year Allstate ceased nixing policies based on holders’ travel plans on its own volition. On March 10, 2004, Rep. Rahm Emanuel (D-Illinois) introduced the “Life Insurance Anti-Discrimination in Travel Act” which was tabled the very next day.
Bernstein said that officers of Israel’s Los Angeles consulate have told ADL staffers that Christian missionary groups have canceled their Israel tours due to concerns that trip-goers would lose insurance policies.
Despite these woes, however, general Israeli tourism numbers are up. Omer Caspi, deputy consul general of San Francisco, noted that in the first three months of 2005, 27 percent more tourists visited Israel than in that period last year, and 24 percent more Americans made the trip.
Augmented numbers notwithstanding, Bernstein claimed that the insurance companies’ policy was discriminatory and must end.