By Health+Law, a research partnership to identify and eliminate legal barriers to testing and treatment for people living with hepatitis B and HIV in Australia.
People living with HIV continue to be denied insurance coverage or are offered coverage on substantially less favourable terms, reinforcing financial insecurity. They also report stigmatising interactions with insurance providers, such as being asked questions irrelevant to actuarial risk, like how they acquired HIV.
Among people living with HIV in Australia surveyed in Health+Law’s legal needs survey (LeNS), 19% said they experienced problems taking out health, travel, life, or other types of insurance or making claims. This is in stark contrast with the less than 1% of people in general population studies who report these problems.
The percentage was similarly high among people living with hepatitis B, 6% of whom reported problems with insurance companies as their ‘most severe’ legal issue. While insurers’ approach to hepatitis B is less researched, there is a need to understand insurers’ procedures and policies on coverage of people with hepatitis B and their compliance with anti-discrimination legislation.
These concerns are not unique to people living with hepatitis B and HIV. Research on the experiences of people living with hepatitis C shows that they are still routinely refused insurance or dissuaded from applying for insurance, despite the advent of direct-acting antiviral treatment, and even after they have undergone curative treatment.
Anti-discrimination law is designed to protect against discrimination by insurers against people with blood-borne viruses, unless such discrimination is reasonable in the circumstances and has regard to reasonably reliable actuarial or statistical data.
Recently, the Council of Australian Life Insurers updated the Life Insurance Code of Practice (‘Life Code’) to introduce commitments requiring insurers to publish on their website information about underwriting related to HIV/AIDS and whether their products have exclusions for HIV/AIDS. Following these changes, an independent review of the Life Code was initiated in 2025, led by consumer advocate Peter Kell.
Significantly, the review recommended an inquiry be conducted by the Life Code Compliance Committee into how insurers approach decisions for customers who disclose blood-borne viruses. The review also recommended amendments to the Code to add sexual orientation, gender identity and sex characteristics as factors that may increase risk of vulnerability, therefore requiring insurers to take extra care to support LGBTIQA+ customers.
This recommendation was based on the findings of the Victorian Pride Lobby’s Worth the Risk report – a groundbreaking roadmap towards better inclusion of LGBTQIA+ insurance customers.
The review also adopted a number of the recommendations made in a joint submission led by the Financial Rights Legal Centre, and an important follow-up submission that included Health+Law’s David Carter alongside colleagues Dr Sean Mulcahy, Professor Kate Sear, Professor Carla Treloar, Liam Elphick, and our partners from the HIV/AIDS Legal Centre: Vikas Parwani and Bethany Rodgers.
The review’s Final Report includes several of our recommendations, including ones aimed at better addressing the experiences of insurance customers living with blood-borne viruses – ‘ensuring that assessment processes and risk evaluation questions are as appropriate, relevant, and non-stigmatising as possible’ and collaborating with HIV and hepatitis-related organisations to implement the requirements of the Code.
The next stage in this process is a proposed inquiry, to be conducted by the Life Code Compliance Committee, which would include an investigation of:
- what procedures and policies insurers have in place to ensure compliance with requirements of the Life Code and anti-discrimination law relating to HIV and other blood-borne viruses, and
- information on coverage denials or less favourable terms offered to people living with HIV and other blood-borne viruses who are seeking insurance.
If the Life Code Compliance Committee decide to conduct this inquiry, it will be incorporated into their next annual Work Plan, which sets out the monitoring body’s priorities and activities to improve insurers’ compliance with the Life Code.
Health+Law is currently writing to the Life Code Compliance Committee to urge that they conduct this inquiry to address the insurance exclusions and less favourable terms offered to people living with blood-borne viruses. We also have an article on HIV and Australian insurance law led by Sean Mulcahy and co-authored by Health+Law’s David Carter forthcoming in the Journal of Law and Medicine. Read more about hepatitis C-related discrimination and the need for reforms to insurance law here.
This article first appeared on the blog of Health+Law.
Posted 30 July 2026
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