{"id":77956,"date":"2025-07-07T19:04:21","date_gmt":"2025-07-07T08:04:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/riskinfo.com.au\/news\/?p=77956"},"modified":"2025-07-15T10:27:00","modified_gmt":"2025-07-14T23:27:00","slug":"federal-court-challenged-over-hcf-insurance-decision","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/riskinfo.com.au\/news\/2025\/07\/07\/federal-court-challenged-over-hcf-insurance-decision\/","title":{"rendered":"Federal Court Challenged Over HCF Insurance Decision"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>ASIC has lodged an appeal against a Federal Court decision that rejected part of its case against <a href=\"https:\/\/www.hcf.com.au\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">HCF Life Insurance<\/a> concerning a pre-existing condition clause in several of the firm\u2019s policies.<\/p>\n<p>In an October 2024 ruling, the court found the clause was likely to mislead consumers, but concluded it was not unfair under the ASIC Act. ASIC is appealing the decision.<\/p>\n<p>The regulator alleges the term was liable to mislead the public and was an unfair contract term under the ASIC Act because it:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Purported to allow HCF Life to deny coverage if a consumer did not disclose a pre-existing condition before entering the contract, and a medical practitioner subsequently formed an opinion that signs or symptoms of the condition existed prior to the consumer entering into the contract, even if a diagnosis had not been made, and<\/li>\n<li>Suggested HCF Life could deny coverage even if the consumer was not aware of the pre-existing condition when entering into the insurance contract and a reasonable person in the circumstances would not have been aware of the condition, in circumstances where section 47 of the Insurance Contacts Act prevents insurers from excluding coverage for non-disclosure of a pre-existing condition where the consumer was unaware of the condition when taking out the insurance, and a reasonable person in the circumstances could not be expected to have been aware of the condition<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>See: <a href=\"https:\/\/riskinfo.com.au\/news\/2024\/10\/29\/hcf-life-contract-term-found-liable-to-mislead-public\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">HCF Life Contract Term Found Liable to Mislead Public<\/a><\/p>\n<p>ASIC is concerned the court took into account the ameliorating effect of section 47 of the Insurance Contracts Act in assessing whether the term was unfair, and that this effectively allows potentially unfair terms in contracts to be cured by legislation.<\/p>\n<p>The term regarding pre-existing conditions, states ASIC, appears in product disclosure statements (in substantially identical terms) in HCF Life&#8217;s Recover range of insurance products, namely cash back, smart term, and income assist (replaced by income protect in October 2021).<\/p>\n<p>Click <a href=\"https:\/\/riskinfo.com.au\/news\/?s=HCF\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">here<\/a> to see previous our reports featuring HCF Life.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>ASIC has lodged an appeal against a Federal Court decision that rejected part of its case against HCF Life Insurance concerning a pre-existing condition clause in several of the firm\u2019s policies. In an October 2024 ruling, the court found the clause was likely to mislead consumers, but concluded it was not unfair under the ASIC [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":23,"featured_media":77958,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[282,8],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-77956","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-associations","8":"category-compliance-regulation"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/riskinfo.com.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77956","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/riskinfo.com.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/riskinfo.com.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/riskinfo.com.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/23"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/riskinfo.com.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=77956"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/riskinfo.com.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77956\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/riskinfo.com.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/77958"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/riskinfo.com.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=77956"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/riskinfo.com.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=77956"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/riskinfo.com.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=77956"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}