A cancer patient receives treatment.
After the high life cover claims seen during the Covid-19 pandemic era, cancer has re-emerged as the leading reason for claims, longer-term insurer Liberty says.
In its 2023 claim statistics released on Tuesday, it said there had been an increase in cancer and cardiovascular claims, with the former accounting for approximately 32.3% of all claims, up from 28.8% in 2022.
Liberty said there was a decrease in claims for respiratory disorders last year and this could signal a return to pre-pandemic norms.
The top five conditions relating to claims in 2023 were spread across cancer and cardiac and cardiovascular diseases and disorders, which made up 23.4% of all claims, while respiratory disorders accounted for 7.3%, strokes for 5.6% and traumatic injuries for 4.5%.
Last year, Liberty paid out R6.72 billion in valid claims to individual clients, their families and beneficiaries. This was slightly less than the R6.98 billion it paid out in 2022. The 2022 figure, however, represented a 31% decrease from 2021, when the insurer paid out R10.12 billion in claims.
The rise in critical illness-related claims aligns with the global healthcare challenge of an increase in non-communicable diseases over the last 20 years, Liberty said.
Critical illness-related claims include cancer, heart attack, stroke and kidney failure.
“In South Africa, death due to major non-communicable diseases has increased by 58% in the last 20 years. The reasons include an increase in urbanisation, unhealthy diets, tobacco use, rising obesity — all contribute to this surge that we are seeing and probably will see in the future,” Liberty’s chief medical officer Reinhardt Erasmus told a briefing.
According to the World Health Organisation, noncommunicable diseases, which include heart disease, stroke, cancer, diabetes and chronic lung disease, are collectively responsible for 74% of all deaths worldwide.
Liberty’s head of risk technical marketing Tom Crotty said the most prevalent form of cancer by far was breast cancer, which accounted for 25.6% of all claims and 54.2% of all claims related to the disease, for women. For men, 34.7% of all cancer claims were related to the prostate.
Breast cancer in South African women is higher than the global average but breast cancer survival rates in South Africa are relatively low compared to countries such as the US and the UK, Crotty noted.
According to the Cancer Association of South Africa, breast cancer is the most common cancer in women of all races, with a lifetime risk of one in 27 in the country.
Last year, Gauteng, KwaZulu-Natal and Western Cape were the provinces with the top claims for cancer and cardiac and cardiovascular diseases. The three provinces cumulatively accounted for 75.8% of claims for the two conditions.
“We have seen that increased claims for cancer have been a growing trend over the years. This could be attributed to a number of reasons such as lifestyle choices, our diets, lack of physical activity and genetic markers,” Erasmus said.
“Given the increasing rate of cancer claims, we continue to encourage better health choices and regular medical check-ups because, with medical advancements, early detection can assist in mitigating these risks earlier.”