Do the insurance companies see a difference between
e-cigarette users from smokers? It seems that according to James
Daley of the Telegraph, apparently not.
It’s well known that smokers pay a premium when it comes to
health or life insurance, but what about users of e-cigarettes?
A recent controversial study said that vaping is 95% less
harmful than smoking regular cigarettes, which is a great boost for
e-cigarettes, but the insurance companies are not convinced. To them, they’re
as bad as smoking.
When taking out a life insurance policy, you will be asked a
litany of questions from your waistline to whether or not you’ve smoked any
tobacco products over the last 12 months (including e-cigarettes). If you
answer yes, your premiums instantly double.
What Daley delves in to is that the companies do not discern
a difference, they don’t ask whether someone is smoking or vaping. He claims
that it’s based on the lack of data. E-cigarettes are still relatively new and
statistics are still forming in the ten years since that they have debuted.
It is time for insurance companies to consider changing
their position. Such a question isn’t so black and white with the advent of
vaping. It is possible that other health problems arise from vaping, but so far
the indication is that it’s nowhere near that of traditional tobacco cigarettes
or tobacco products.
Insurers aren’t the only ones still figuring out what to
think about e-cigarettes. No one is sure how they want to tax them, do they tax
them like a pack of cigarettes? No one is sure how to regulate their storage or
interstate travel. The Food & Drug Administration is making rumblings that
they will be categorizing them as tobacco products in regards to regulations.
That means that e-cigarette companies will need to change how they go about
manufacturing their products.
InstantGMP can help with that last part. We have a number of
companies that manufacture e-liquids and we guide them through the regulations,
but also provide a cloud-based software solution that saves them money by
organizing their manufacturing process, automating inventory, the ability to
make minor changes to a batch, scaling its size, and providing that
traceability in case something happens. If you’d like to check out our demo, click here
to get started.
We can’t really help with the insurance quandary, apologies
for that.