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I do believe that this is the kind of thing that should be a constitutional right afforded to the individual and not a power that may be exercised over you by a

• chaorace 6y ago
  That on its own is an interesting problem, isn't it? If you insure a car, then crash it for the payout, we would consider that insurance fraud. We make it against the law, because it has a negative externality in the form of making everyone else's insurance rates higher. In principle, suicide clauses exist for the same reason. If they didn't exist, you would actually be incentivizing people to kill themselves and raising insurance premiums for everyone else. These are both bad things that most people would want to avoid. Then again, it's not like you can kill yourself twice, so, unlike car insurance fraud, this is a self-solving problem! My gut tells me that awarding life insurance payouts to families of suicide victims is the wrong tool for this particular problem. Perhaps the government itself should insure individuals against family suicides? This would avoid creating undue drag upon the private insurance market while also ensuring that even poor families (those I suspect are most vulnerable to losing a bread-winner to suicide) are protected. Since the two systems are now decoupled, you could even independently disincentivize suicides for financial security by making the payout lower than a normal life-insurance payout typically would be.