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In August 2007, the Ministry of Justice of Korea promulgated the revision draft of Insurance Law codified in Korean Commercial Code(hereinafter "KCC").
The most dramatic change intended by the draft lies in the duty of insurer to explain the material clauses contained in the insurance policy. Korean law regulating general terms of consumer contract, enacted in 1986, requires an entrepreneur to explain the material terms, and if she or he fails to do so, the terms shall be excluded from the contract. As late as in the year of 1991,
KCC introduced an article to reverse the legal consequences of the opting out, awarding the insured the alternative right to revoke the contract or accept the clauses as a whole by waiving the right. KCC's goal was to make the opt-out method void as inconsistent with the alternative right, but Korean Supreme Court refused to follow the KCC legislative object and did not changed its attitude toward the insurer's duty to expalin the policy terms.
A viable Insurance system presupposes a considerable size of group members being subject to the same sort of disasters. Each member of the group contributes the premium and copes with the common difficulties hand in hand.
This collective nature of the insurance contracts requires insurers to deal with every insured all the same, and the general terms of insurance policy helps to this end. Even if an insurer fails to perform the duty to explain the material terms of its insurance policy, it is undesirable to allow the insured a privileged right not shared by other insureds in the same group. That is why
KCC attempts to revise the duty again by adding a passage - "if the insured does not revoke the contract, the general terms of the policy applies to the contract." In conclusion, KCC Revision Draft appears to be reasonable on this matter, but it would be worth while to watch out for the judicial resistance opposing to the radical change of the status quo.