Founder of critical illness (CI) cover, Dr Marius Barnard , talks to Johanna Gornitzki about his life, his career and his future hopes for the CI market
Dr Marius Barnard grew up in an area of South Africa filled with drought and poverty.
The son of a missionary, he spent much of his childhood in one of the country's most deprived areas.
But while his upbringing was modest, he was lucky to have parents who understood the value of knowledge and encouraged him and his brothers to study.
Now, Dr Barnard is known as one of the world's most acclaimed heart surgeons and as the founder of critical illness (CI) cover.
But it has not been an easy ride.
Once he had completed his medical schooling, Dr Barnard began his career as a family doctor in Zimbabwe where he stayed for nearly a decade before deciding to go to Houston, Texas, to train to be a vascular surgeon.
However, financially, it proved very difficult and with a young family to look after, Dr Barnard found himself back in his home country looking for work.
"I eventually came back to South Africa and I had to get a job straightaway. Fortunately, my brother, who was a trained cardiac surgeon, offered me a job in cardiac surgery, which I quickly snapped up," he explains.
The job meant that Dr Barnard had to abandon his original plan to become a vascular surgeon and instead focus his efforts on cardiac surgery.
This turned out to be a fortunate move because only five months later, the unit of cardiac surgeons he was part of, became the first team in the world to perform a successful heart transplant, and overnight, Dr Barnard's name became widely known throughout the medical world.
Highlighting the importance of that event, Dr Barnard says: "On the night of 3 December, 1967, we did a heart transplant and I wouldn't be sitting here today if it wasn't for that operation. That heart transplant was a significant achievement and it opened up many doors for me." Wider implications Despite his success, working as a surgeon in a large hospital meant that Dr Barnard had hardly any time to spend with his patients.
Normal procedures, which included a case arriving a few days before the operation and then leaving a few days later, left him with no time to grasp the wider implications surgery can have on a patient's life.
It was therefore not until he started practicing privately in 1980 that he became aware of the problems people face both before and after being hospitalised.
"All of a sudden, I realised that illnesses also had financial side effects because everybody we operated on did not just get up and start going again. A lot of people had to change their lifestyles, and some of them even had to stop working," he says.
As Dr Barnard started to grasp the breadth of this problem, he began thinking about developing an insurance plan that would insure people suffering from a critical illness.
"I realised that while life assurance is great for insuring lives, the majority of people need insurance because they are going to live, not because they are going to die," he says.
And slowly his idea of CI cover began to take shape.
However, it took him a couple of years to get an insurer to lend their support to the idea and it was not until 1983, when a new insurance company, Crusader Life, looking for a novel product, finally put the theory into practice.
The first CI product was born.
Since then, the world of medicine has undergone major advances, with the need for the product changing alongside it.
This has led the original CI cover, which once only covered four conditions, to evolve into the product it is today.
Now being sold all over the world, it has been hailed as one of the most successful protection products of recent years.
However, that does not mean that the product has not experienced a number of growing pains, some of which are still felt today.
In the UK, for example, the industry continues to struggle to reach a consensus on how to define the different critical illnesses.
Dr Barnard finds this dilemma extraordinary.
"Nowhere else in the world is there such a thing as a definition debate. In fact, people don't even mention it. It is only here in the UK that this is a problem," he argues.
Consensus Dr Barnard believes this problem stems from the fact that advisers are scared of being sued and therefore want to cover their backs, not once, but again and again.
"Of course the definition debate is linked to the fact that the UK has a strong IFA community. Advisers have come to me and expressed their fear of getting sued. But I can get sued too. I mean, nobody gets sued more than doctors, but I did not stop working because of that. Instead, I made sure I knew my subject and performed my job to the best of my abilities," he says.
Dr Barnard also thinks that, instead of wasting their time worrying about the difficulties they may face when selling the cover, advisers should focus on what a great product CI really is.
"All I hear when I walk around here is that 20% of critical illness claims are not paid. However, the fact is that 80% are paid. Statistics such as 20% of the claims are not being paid are not strictly true because 20% of the claims should not be paid because they don't fit the criteria," he says.
Looking to the future, Dr Barnard argues that CI has to undergo further changes, and instead of paying out a lump sum at diagnosis, he believes CI payouts should be based on the severity of a patient's condition.
This would mean that a certain amount would be paid every time the disease reaches a new stage.
Affordability "In 10 years' time, this will be the only product in the market. And if it is not, then we are going to run into trouble because diagnosis is getting better and most people have treatment and then walk out. If they continue to receive full payout at diagnosis, the cover will become so expensive it will no longer remain affordable for those that really need it," says Dr Barnard.
"After all, what I would like to see is a product that is patient orientated, not provider or IFA orientated. It has to be aimed at the person who buys the product," he adds.
Regardless of whether a person is a patient or a policyholder, for Dr Barnard, people always come first.
"People helping people – that is what it all is about," he says.
