You have identified "recent" with regards to mental health issues - cancer has been a greater stigma for considerably longer and yet insurers are still allowed to weight premiums against sufferers, even for those in remission for several years and despite advances in treatment meaning significant improvement in long term prognosis.

Insurance is a risk analysis and insurers accumulate vast amounts of data (all historical) with which their under-writers base decisions on what to cover and at what premium - only as newer data is added do the old preconceptions become diminished over time.

The "owners" of insurance are no longer the grand old names of the past but rather venture capatilists seeking to assure income with minimal pay out (one of their reasons for investing).

Feel free to worry now but consider that one day our parliament will inadevertantley pass legislation such that anyone having undertaken a DNA profile will be obligated to provide such possibly negative information to any potential provider and even worse they may mandate we all submit to DNA profiling.

GDPR is about the individual whereas insurance is about the collective e.g. male 18 year old drivers more likely to crash, cars in London are more likely to be stolen etc. all anonymised data and lawfully gathered from claim forms. The questions are to see which "data set" the proposer belongs to in order to determine risk and premium.

Look then at what travel insurance is intended to cover from the health perspective - hospitalisation, treatment, repatriation - for the US where such costs are significantly higher than the rest of the world so are the premiums (a fit young healthy traveller pays more for a single US trip than a family annual policy for europe WITH pre-existing medical conditions including asthma and arthritis).

For curtailment and cancellation there may be concern that the insured may have a turn or require treatment preventing travel meaning the insurer must pay out - given the higher (than "others") risk is it really unfair they weight premiums?

There are plenty of providers and search sites available to obtain competitive quotation but remember no insurance is at the same price point for all persons irregardless of age, gender, medical history, genetic predisposition, employment or where they live.

Even our wonderful NHS has post code, age, weight and other life style limitations to treatments dependent upon the whims of the local comissioning groups and trusts - only absolute life saving treatment is guaranteed to all in all locations - is it unreasonable with this disparity insurers have reservations about the quality of mental health care provision?

Mental health issues are often forgotten when looking at the risks covered by business travel insurance. I recently attended an event on international travel in connection with the Higher Education sector and I was told of a horror story involving an academic researcher who travelled to Jamaica for work. While there she had a mental health breakdown and she was hospitalised in Jamaica as result. The airlines would not let her travel home unless she was accompanied by a qualified mental health nurse and the University travel insurance policy would not cover this cost as it was “a pre-existing condition”. So the University in question had to fork out £30,000 to get the poor woman home.

Edited by user 14 January 2019 09:49:44(UTC)  | Reason: mispelling

Tim

You ask a wise question in relation to occupational health risks of a person with a reocrd of mental health problems travelling.

The technical answer to \is it reasonable to collect this data, and how is it being assessed?' is 'Yes, and the data is assessed in a variety of ways, good, bad and indifferent. The root challenge is the host of mental health conditions and how to relaibly, fairly and validly assess them;  unless you gather information from co-operating employees, the task is simply impossible

As an OSH practitioner interested in refining and improving my thinking about such questions, I find 'Statistical Methods for Communication Science'  (Andrew F Hayes, Routledge, 2015) and other titles by the same author worth the time and trouble in getting to grips with the far-reaching issues involved.  In practice, the knowledge learned makes it relatively stratightforward to gather data on the quality of risk assessmsnet of an organization about the host of physical and mental and ergonomic risks in organizations I serve  or avoid serving. 

In the field of occupaitonal safety and health, there are few menaces worse than a CMIOSH who falsefly believes he/she understands the host of risks to which people for whom he/she is responsibile, and habitually blames others for uncontrolled problems of risk exposure, other than those who appointed him/her and assess his/her work performance

Travel insurance is a funny thing - having worked in the insurance industry my guess is that they are basing risk and therefore premiums on the likelihood of people travelling abroad and either attempting or succeeding in suicide.