‘Right to be forgotten’ is written into French law
It is intended to protect cancer survivors against discrimination from private insurers and banks
The right to be forgotten – a major advance in the 2014-2019 Cancer Plan, is now written into French law and is intended to protect cancer survivors against discrimination from private insurers and banks.
When buying personal insurance or applying for a mortgage or other loan from a bank, cancer survivors would previously often face reticence from wary financial institutions which would either refuse to underwrite them or would do so under unfavourable terms.
A staple condition when applying for finance has been to fill out a health questionnaire and, for cancer survivors, failure to include their past disease would place them in breach of their contract with the financial institution. In the case of insurance, for instance, this would mean insurers were no longer obliged to honour a claim.
To address this, the 2014-2019 plan introduced a legal 10-year limit, following which cancer survivors were not required to disclose their past disease when applying for insurance or for finance.
This limit was reduced to five years for people whose cancer had been diagnosed before their twenty-first birthday. This limit is referred to as the ‘right to be forgotten’. After this limit disclosure of past illness is not required and banks and insurers cannot therefore use such a medical history to deny the person coverage under standard terms.
The period starts from the end of active treatment for the disease. This refers to surgeries, radiotherapy and chemotherapy etc (continuation of certain milder treatments such as hormone therapy is allowed). In 2022, the government reduced this to five years for everyone.
On top of this there is a list of conditions, including certain specific cancers, where the sufferer can benefit from loans or insurance at no, or reduced, financial penalties after a shorter period, but the condition still needs to be declared.
In 2022 a law was passed to the effect that health questionnaires should not be required for mortgage applications for less than €200,000, where the loan payments are due to end before the applicant reaches the age of 60.
In addition to this, the National Cancer Institute has been working with insurers on possible changes to the existing AERAS Convention scheme (Assurer et Emprunter avec un Risque Aggravé de Santé) to make financial credit generally more accessible to people with an increased health risk.
This is hoped to allow survivors, former patients and patients in remission to take out loans and mortgages under more favourable terms. The Banque Populaire and Caisse d’Epargne group said in 2024, breast cancer survivors could now qualify for borrower’s insurance (required for home mortgages), with no surcharges or exclusions, as soon as they had finished ‘active treatment’, without waiting a further five years.