The interesting point is that the insurance companies do know why they died
Or at least what is on the death certificate.
I no longer have life insurance, so I may be wrong on this, but insurance companies in the past were very interested in your profession and your hobbies and rates could vary if you were in a high risk profession.
These are from company group life. Those are the, “You are covered for X times your salary” policies. There are almost zero restrictions or data collected on those people when they are added.
The demographics on these folks would be interesting.
The sociological changes over the past few years would be interesting to overlay. People are disconnected, depressed, and their entire routine has changed. Working people are not active any more. Working from home means personal care has changed. Some people are actually more active (daily ‘walkers’ have increased in my town, for example.).
18-64 is a huge range. I would love to see the CODs for 18-35, and 35-64. Behaviors are significantly different for those groups.
It will be years before the actuaries are done with this information. But you know that somewhere in the basement of Mass Mutual’s home office there are some nerds going, “holy sh!t!”.
Insurance companies treat individual life insurance claims differently than they do group insurance claims. Group life insurance is typically for a very low amount compared to individual policies, so the verification process isn’t very extensive. Many of these companies don’t even check the death certificates for group claims; they just verify that the SS# has been deactivated, then pay the claim.