# Insurance, mortgages and the right to be forgotten

Source: https://onco.cc/technologies/rejuv-life-insurance-loans-and-the-right-to-be-forgotten/  
OnCo record `rejuv-life-insurance-loans-and-the-right-to-be-forgotten` (Technology). Data CC BY-NC 4.0, attribute "Data from OnCo (onco.cc)"; commercial use needs a licence.

## TL;DR

Nine European Union countries have passed laws giving people who have had cancer the right not to declare it when applying for a loan or insurance after a set period, commonly five to ten years for adults and five for a cancer diagnosed young. Where the laws have been in force longest, acceptance rates are high and the strain on insurers is reported as minimal.

## Summary

The problem these laws address is specific: long after treatment has finished and the excess risk of dying has fallen to near zero, a person applying for a mortgage, a life insurance policy or a business loan must declare the cancer, and is refused, loaded with a higher premium or excluded for the condition. The cost lands on exactly the group least able to absorb it, people diagnosed young enough to still be buying a house.

The current state, from a 2025 review in a European oncology journal. It records that 23 million people in Europe are living after a cancer diagnosis, and that the European Cancer Information System projects 3.25 million new cases in the 27 member states by 2040 against 2.74 million in 2022. On the financial consequences it reports rates of objective financial burden of 41 to 48 per cent and of subjective financial strain of 7 to 39 per cent, "even in public health care systems", with socioeconomic vulnerability and incomplete social protection the most consistent drivers, and notes that "Eleven trials of early financial navigation produced only modest, short-term improvements."

On the laws themselves: "Nine EU countries have enacted RTBF legislations. Common eligibility criteria include a minimum remission period (MRP) of 5-10 years for adults, a universal 5-year MRP for pediatric/adolescent cancers, and shorter MRPs (1-3 years) for very-low-risk entities. A significant variability exists between eligibility criteria across countries." On whether they work without breaking the market: "Available data from countries where RTBF has been enforced for a longer period show high acceptance rate of survivors' loan insurance applications with acceptable solvency and minimal strain on the insurance system." The European Society for Medical Oncology's own recommendation in that paper is for European Union-wide adoption of a unified five-year period, together with research on dynamic risk models.

Whether the periods are set at the right length is now an empirical question, and one country has answered it for younger patients. A population-based study used the Netherlands Cancer Registry to follow 71,973 people diagnosed with an invasive solid cancer as an adolescent or young adult between 1998 and 2021, and calculated five-year conditional relative survival year by year. The whole cohort reached the threshold of minimal excess mortality, defined as conditional relative survival above 95 per cent, four years after diagnosis. For survivors of germ cell and trophoblastic tumours of the ovary and testis, malignant melanoma, thyroid carcinoma, skin carcinoma and neuroendocrine tumours, excess mortality was minimal from diagnosis onwards. The required disclosure period in the Netherlands runs up to ten years. The authors' point is that the law and the survival data have come apart, at least for this age group.

What OnCo could not verify, and therefore does not state. The individual national statutes were not read from primary legal text in this round: one government legal database refused automated access and the others were not reached, so this record does not name which country legislated first, in which year, or what each country's exact period is beyond the ranges the review gives. Nor could OnCo verify from a primary source what rule, if any, governs disclosure of a past cancer diagnosis to a mortgage lender or life insurer in the United Kingdom, which is not a member state and is not among the nine. A reader in the United Kingdom should treat the absence of a statement here as an absence of verified information rather than as evidence that no protection exists, and ask a charity's financial guidance service, which is free.

Why this belongs on a page about recovery rather than on a policy page. The practical effect of a disclosure rule is that a person who has finished treatment and been told they are well cannot buy the house, cannot get the mortgage protection the lender requires, and in some cases cannot take the job that requires a key-person policy. It is one of the few parts of this front where the obstacle is not biological, is written down, and has already been removed in nine places.

## Fields

- Kind: Technology
- Status: emerging
- Last checked: 2026-10-02
- Tags: rejuvenation; survivorship; psychosocial; policy
- Principle: Insurance pricing uses a declared history as a proxy for excess mortality. Once conditional relative survival has returned to that of the general population, the proxy no longer tracks the risk it was standing in for, and continued loading is a charge for the history rather than for the risk. A right to be forgotten is the legal instrument that stops the proxy being used after the point at which the data say it has stopped predicting.
- Strengths: Nine countries have legislated, so the effect on insurance markets is observable rather than hypothetical; Conditional relative survival gives an objective basis for setting the period; The reported effect on insurers is small, which removes the main argument against
- Limitations: Periods vary widely between countries and in the Netherlands exceed what the survival data support for younger patients; OnCo could not read the individual national statutes from primary legal text in this round; No verified position on the United Kingdom, which has no such law among the nine

## Sources

- Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_be_forgotten
- Promoting equitable access to financial services to end financial discrimination against cancer survivors in Europe: scientific and ethical reasons (ESMO Open 2025): https://doi.org/10.1016/j.esmoop.2025.105767
- 5-year conditional relative survival of adolescents and young adults with solid malignancies in the Netherlands: a population-based cohort study (Lancet Reg Health Eur 2025): https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lanepe.2025.101429

## Connected records

- ideas: [A survivorship passport app for adolescent and young adult survivors](https://onco.cc/ideas/idea-acc-aya-survivorship-passport/), [Ban life and disability insurers from using genetic results](https://onco.cc/ideas/idea-prev-genetic-non-discrimination-insurance/)
- cancers: [Acute lymphoblastic leukaemia](https://onco.cc/cancers/all-leukemia/), [Hodgkin lymphoma](https://onco.cc/cancers/hodgkin-lymphoma/), [HR-positive / HER2-negative breast cancer](https://onco.cc/cancers/breast-hr-positive/), [Melanoma](https://onco.cc/cancers/melanoma/), [Testicular germ cell tumours](https://onco.cc/cancers/testicular/), [Thyroid cancer](https://onco.cc/cancers/thyroid/)
- fronts: [Recovery & Rejuvenation](https://onco.cc/fronts/rejuvenation/), [Supportive Care & Survivorship](https://onco.cc/fronts/supportive-care/)
- technologies: [Employment rights with cancer in the United Kingdom](https://onco.cc/technologies/rejuv-life-employment-rights-uk/), [Employment rights with cancer in the United States](https://onco.cc/technologies/rejuv-life-employment-rights-us/), [Financial toxicity and financial navigation](https://onco.cc/technologies/financial-navigation/), [Money after treatment: what the cost of cancer does once the treatment has finished](https://onco.cc/technologies/rejuv-life-money-after-treatment/), [Survivorship care and late-effects surveillance](https://onco.cc/technologies/survivorship-care-plan/)
- terms: [Financial toxicity](https://onco.cc/terms/financial-toxicity/), [Late effects and survivorship toxicity](https://onco.cc/terms/late-effects/), [Quality of life](https://onco.cc/terms/quality-of-life/)
- bottlenecks: [Survivorship and late effects are neglected](https://onco.cc/bottlenecks/b-survivorship/)

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