Quora Answer: As a Company Director & Type I Diabetic, is There Insurance You Can Get?

The following is my answer to a Quora question: “If you are a company director and Type I diabetic, is there any insurance you can get to cover you if you get ill due to your condition?”

Getting a policy for your business is often general insurance.  It mitigates liability for legal action, force majeure, or various forms of loss.  A wide variety of coverage exists for a wide variety of risks.  None of that touches your personal health coverage as a director, and that remains the actual problem.

Personal Insurance: The Underwriting Wall

Any personal health or life policy, regardless of whether you or your company owns it, treats diabetes as a pre-existing condition.  AIA Singapore, for example, states in its own underwriting guidance that pre-existing conditions are not covered unless declared and accepted during underwriting, and every application requires full medical disclosure.

AIA Singapore does sell a dedicated diabetes product, AIA Diabetes Care, covering five diabetes-related critical illnesses, blindness, kidney failure, stroke, heart attack, and coronary artery bypass surgery, at a premium guaranteed unchanged until age 80.  Read the product description closely, and the limitation becomes obvious.  AIA built this specifically for pre-diabetics and Type 2 diabetics.  Type 1 diabetics are not the target market this product was designed to serve, and standard term and whole life underwriting elsewhere routinely declines or heavily loads Type 1 applicants outright.  Manulife Critical SelectCare is one of the few Singapore products explicitly considering Type 1 diabetic applicants, using HbA1c-friendly underwriting rather than an automatic decline.

The Integrated Shield Plan Layer

Seven insurers currently offer Integrated Shield Plans in Singapore: AIA, Great Eastern, HSBC Life, Income Insurance, Prudential, Raffles Health Insurance, and Singlife.  Every Singapore citizen and Permanent Resident already holds MediShield Life, covering pre-existing conditions for life at the subsidised, public hospital level.  The private component layered on top through an IP, AIA’s own HealthShield Gold Max included, does not automatically extend that same pre-existing condition coverage.  Underwriting decides case by case, and the outcome typically lands in one of two places: exclusion of diabetes-related claims, or acceptance with a premium loading.

Group Insurance: Still the Most Realistic Path

Group insurance underwrites the workforce, not each employee individually.  Employees with diabetes, hypertension, or a history of cancer can be covered without medical examinations or exclusions, provided the group meets standard participation criteria.  As a company director, structuring your own coverage through a company group health policy remains the most reliable route to genuine diabetes coverage, precisely because the insurer is pricing the group’s average risk, not scrutinising your individual HbA1c reading.

Diabetes-related complication costs in Singapore are projected to exceed S$10,000 per patient per year by 2050.  A director relying on personal underwriting, hoping a product built for Type 2 diabetics will stretch to cover his Type 1 condition, is planning against rising costs with a policy never designed for his risk profile in the first place.

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Terence Nunis | Executive Chairman, Equinox Zenith | Author, The 1% Playbook: The Billionaire Cheat Code