Abstract
Forty-nine years have passed since the agricultural cooperative started life insurance business in 1952. Right from the start, it expanded by leaps and bounds. As of the end of fiscal 1999, the total number of contracts amounted to 13, 350, 000 cases for endowment insurance and 4, 240, 000 cases for whole life insurance. The average value of death benefits per policy came to ¥12, 000, 000 for former and ¥21, 000, 000 for the latter. Worthy of special mention is the fact that a considerably large sum of money is assured to a beneficiary designated by the owner of a whole life insurance policy.
We made analyses of mortality rates and causes of death among insureds over a period of 20 years from 1980, using the agricultural cooperative life insurance statistics.
Broadly, deaths from strokes and accidents were on the decline. This was probably attributable to individuals' efforts at prevention. By contrast, mortality rates for malignant neoplasms tended to increase year after year. Especially lung cancer and liver cancer rates were being on a sharp upward curve, whereas cancer of the stomach tended to claim less lives in recent years. In the present study, we picked up 16 prefectures and carried out a longitudinal study of data on the mortalities for the abovementioned three types of cancer.
