Description: Critical Illness (CI) insurance in Asia has evolved through data-driven insights, adapting to changing medical, demographic, and lifestyle trends. Gen Re’s CI Data Insights Study, covering Mainland China, Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, and Thailand, highlights how advances in screening, especially for cancers, have influenced incidence rates and claims. Regular updates to CI definitions and product structures are essential for sustainability, as seen in the handling of thyroid and prostate cancers. Lifestyle factors like BMI also impact cardiovascular risk. A multi-dimensional approach combining robust data monitoring, proactive product updates, and wellness promotion ensures CI insurance remains relevant and sustainable.

Description: This article explores how the ideas in Abundance, the bestselling book by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, offer a fresh lens for understanding both society and the life-insurance industry. The book contrasts two ways of thinking: a scarcity mindset that assumes limits, protects the status quo, and manages decline; and an abundance mindset that believes capacity can expand through innovation, investment, and imagination. The article traces how these philosophies appear in American history, politics, and public policy—from immigration rhetoric to wartime mobilization—and shows how over-regulation often traps entire sectors in scarcity. Against this backdrop, the article argues that life insurance remains anchored in scarcity thinking, even as other industries—streaming, digital platforms, and the sharing economy—have embraced abundance with transformative results. The protection gap illustrates the issue: U.S. households face a US$25 trillion shortfall in mortality coverage, yet actuarial practice tends to price narrowly, underwrite cautiously, and focus on existing insured lives rather than millions of underserved families. The article calls for a shift toward abundance through broader underwriting, inclusive product design, alternative data, parametric solutions, regulatory engagement, and financial literacy. By choosing abundance, the industry can close protection gaps and redefine its role in expanding opportunity.