Concentrate! How many types of insurance are you familiar with?Make your list: life, health, death, travel, home, car, ski… starting to find it hard to think of anything else? Theft, pets, bicycles, smartphones… not bad! Getting more than ten is already a considerable achievement. You’ve probably made your list by taking a mental tour of everyday situations, right? But what about contingencies that go beyond the normal? Can they be insured?
Close Insurance of the Third Kind!
Of course they can! Welcome to the world of original insurance! Many of these policies, hardly surprisingly, were created in the United States, where everything or almost everything can be insured. By the 1950s, at the height of the UFO phenomenon, the first policies for possible extraterrestrial abductions appeared that not only covered abduction and its negative consequences, but all kinds of accidents associated with extraterrestrial activity. In addition to becoming a great advertising claim – any insurance company worth its salt needed to have this kind of policy in its catalog – they also became a kind of template on which to develop different insurance policies in the future.
Who broke that window?
A good example of this was insurance against the “zombie apocalypse”, very fashionable in the 1990s. In the purest “Walking Dead” style, its coverage ranged from the incineration of zombies to the reinforcement of home security, medical assistance, and the supply of weapons and ammunition. Without leaving the world of the paranormal, there are also policies that include the appearance of ghosts in the home to cover any kind of attack on the tenants as well as any damages caused to the furniture by poltergeists
Dying of laughter
Not all unusual insurance policies belong in the realm of mystery. Here are just a few examples: anti-pollution insurance, which first emerged in Hong Kong, provides health care for pathologies related to pollution or losses due to not being able to travel to work; or what about coverage for film exhibitors against the possible death of a viewer from laughing in the movie theater?
The best known policies in the ‘unusual’ category are those that cover body parts: the legs of footballers and singers or actresses; the hands of goalkeepers or guitarists; the thumbs of Formula 1 drivers; the noses of wine or coffee tasters; and the vocal chords of singers.
What original insurance can you think of? It may be something we haven’t considered yet!
