The law that governs the rules of insurance contracts currently includes an article in the section on life insurance that establishes a one-year waiting period to collect them when death occurs. That is, in the case in which the insured commits suicide, the beneficiaries only collect if 12 months have passed since the signing of the insurance contract. This Wednesday, the Congress of Deputies receives a proposal to eliminate this clause and close the door for insurance to penalize this way of dying.
In practice, the collection of life insurance from a suicide is not limited to that one-year gap that marks the norm that leaves the door open (“unless otherwise agreed,” says the law) to even denying payment of the compensation.
Dolors López is, according to herself, a survivor of her daughter’s suicide. During this time he has worked to break down the moral walls of a topic that has been taboo for many years and that, however, is ranked as . López explains how when a person commits suicide, “”. “This tear is aggravated by the stigma that falls like a stone on the survivors,” he adds. If complicated economic conditions are added to all this, the refusal to collect insurance due to the circumstances of the death “increases the suffering.”
López, author of I name youa book in which she tells how she faced the death of her only daughter – she is the coordinator of the Teacher Training Plan on suicide prevention, detection and intervention of the Ministry of Education of the Valencian Community and also provides training to police officers and firefighters who On many occasions, they are the first to respond to alert calls. “who have committed suicide and have not been able to collect life insurance compensation,” he says. With that information he found the article of the Insurance Contract Law of 1980, which, in his opinion, maintains “that kind of punishment for having committed suicide.” “Why is this waiting period imposed? Why can’t it be charged in these cases and in other cases it can?” he asks while describing how “very unfair” this “punishment” is.
The proposal, which seeks to be processed through a , which provides for the participation of citizens in the legislative sphere after the presentation of 500,000 signatures, calls for the modification of that article 93 so that both the waiting period and the possibility of total exclusion of the beneficiaries’ right to compensation in the event of death by suicide of the insured. “Its objective is to correct this unfair treatment and place in the public debate the terrible social phenomenon of suicide in all its aspects and consequences,” says the author of the initiative.
Dolors López refutes that the veto of these requirements could constitute an “incentive” for suicide. “No one is bad because they want to,” he states with the same finality that explains a person who commits suicide. “No one consciously or voluntarily wants to commit suicide for any other reason than to stop feeling intense suffering,” he alleges. Furthermore, based on his experience, he maintains that even among vulnerable people this regulatory change does not have to be an incentive or cause a contagion effect “because no one wants to be in that situation,” he maintains.
The condition of life insurance is, according to López, just an example of what persists as a stigma, “like a social brand.” As an example of this, she tells the case of a young woman from Alicante whose accounts have been seized for not paying the 211 euros that the City Council of her city demands for the bill for her rescue in a suicide attempt. “It is another case that dramatizes the stigma,” says Dolors López, “morally it is condemned and culturally it is marked as something that has been done wrong and must be punished.”
