> I think any insurance company would have a lifelong suicide exclusion if they could
I suspect you're right.
There certainly are desperate people who go to Vegas, lose their entire savings, and choose to end their life because they're not willing to put in the work to continue trying to survive for another, say, 40 years, starting with zero assets.
There are also people with severe mental illness (poor/no executive function, prone to psychotic episodes, imbalances in their brain chemistry) who make poor choices or don't even consciously make choices but their body is nonetheless doing things, who end up also choosing to end their lives.
There is overlap between these two groups. How could an insurance company decide which is which? If cancer can kill you and they pay out for that, why would they not pay out for deaths due to mental illness? Because they can. We're becoming more willing to talk about mental health, but there's still a ways to go.
There's a ton of stuff that can go wrong with the mind and I couldn't hazard a guess at what proportion of people are 100% okay.
There’s also probably some social bias. In the US, we have a strong bias towards self-determinism and saying someone did something because (in-effect) they are pre-wired to make that deterministic action flies in the face of social conventions about individual free will. There are always some policies that are shot down because they run against social normative ideas, even if those ideas are shown to be false.
(The free will vs determinism is obviously overly simplistic above)
I suspect you're right.
There certainly are desperate people who go to Vegas, lose their entire savings, and choose to end their life because they're not willing to put in the work to continue trying to survive for another, say, 40 years, starting with zero assets.
There are also people with severe mental illness (poor/no executive function, prone to psychotic episodes, imbalances in their brain chemistry) who make poor choices or don't even consciously make choices but their body is nonetheless doing things, who end up also choosing to end their lives.
There is overlap between these two groups. How could an insurance company decide which is which? If cancer can kill you and they pay out for that, why would they not pay out for deaths due to mental illness? Because they can. We're becoming more willing to talk about mental health, but there's still a ways to go.
There's a ton of stuff that can go wrong with the mind and I couldn't hazard a guess at what proportion of people are 100% okay.