New York Post By Will Feuer
The COVID-19 pandemic sent life insurance payouts soaring to the highest level in a single year ever in 2020 and drove the largest year-over-year spike since the 1918 pandemic, an industry group said Thursday.
Life insurance companies paid more than $90 billion to beneficiaries in 2020, the highest ever on record, according to the American Council of Life Insurers.
That’s up from 2019 by 15.4 percent, the fastest year-over-year increase since 1918, when another pandemic ravaged the world, sending life insurance claims up a whopping 41 percent.
Despite the record increase, payouts for the year were actually lower than the industry expected early in the pandemic because so many of the deaths were older people who typically have smaller life insurance policies, the Wall Street Journal noted.
More than 385,000 people in the US died of COVID-19-related complications in 2020, according to the most recent death certificate data from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It’s unclear how many owned life insurance…READ FULL ARTICLE HERE…- nypost.com
