Category Archives: insurance
Cancellations
Hard on the heels of my blog post on the subject of the new lurgy, I find myself succumbed to a lurgy. Only a mild one, but I’ve removed myself from this evening’s concert and meal out and will check NHS advice before resuming social life.
Or rather, I removed myself from the meal out with my friends, that Jen had arranged for after the concert. ‘Cos the concert itself was one of many cultural events to be cancelled by its organisers. This evening I’d’ve been in the audience, but three concerts I am (or was) due to perform in this spring have also been cancelled or are at risk.
Yet our government, unlike many others, hasn’t actually banned events like these. They’re leaving it to event organisers. I suspect there’s an important beneficiary of that: insurers of all kinds of events could be on the hook for financial losses if the government forced them to close down, but can escape that if the decision comes from event organisers. Perhaps they’ll legislate but are leaving time for events near enough to have incurred substantial costs to be cancelled beforehand?
I also heard on t’wireless a discussion programme on coronavirus that included a number of callers. A couple of interesting nuggets emerged from that: quite a few callers described symptoms very similar to mine (evidently it’s a lurgy “doing the rounds”), and many callers complained that they wanted to get tested for coronavirus but couldn’t. Even those with very good reasons (for example a GP keen to know whether he would be personally safe to treat virus sufferers once he’s recovered) had faced an impenetrable wall of bureaucracy.
So we’ve moved from attempting to refusing to count cases, thus perhaps paving the way to fudge relevant statistics. They’re talking about “herd immunity”, which would imply a large majority of the entire population going down with the virus. At a 2% death rate, that could be a million deaths!
Quite a contrast to the draconian and stupid measures we had to rid ourselves of Foot&Mouth (against which a vaccine is available) back in 2001. Have Brits really changed so much in less than a generation that we’ll no longer obey rules? Particularly when the threat this time is to humans, and the rules (if well-considered) have a purpose other than to support the economic interests of a small number of very big and very rich farmers!
Past mistakes
Controversy of the week: what to do about the legacy of cosmetic surgery in which a key component is (retrospectively) deemed defective? Should the offending breast implants be removed, replaced, or left alone? Who should pay? Different countries have reacted differently, and every reaction is sure to have outraged someone.
I find it slightly bizarre that this should be seen as a matter for governments. Surely it should be for medical professionals to deal with: is there a medical issue, and if so what are the pros and cons of each option? The role of politicians might be to consider how it happened in the first place and whether there are lessons to be learned for the regulatory system. But I hesitate to say that, because the most likely outcome of politicians reviewing a hot topic like this is to make things worse.
I have one suggestion for them. The question of who pays if corrective surgery is required can and should be dealt with by requiring all cosmetic surgery to carry insurance against the full cost of such an event arising in the lifetime of the patient. An insurer, having its own money at stake, is better-motivated than a regulator to scrutinise the actual risks of any particular procedure. It is also better-equipped to do so, with the budget for expert scrutiny being determined by the actual risk being taken on, rather than competing with many unrelated tasks for a fixed, politically-determined pot.
Oh, and I wonder if this’ll lead to a whole raft of similar cases being unearthed as journalists seek out new stories?
Insewerants
March is the time of year my home insurance comes up for renewal. This year I took the time to shop around using online price comparisons, and found a far better deal than my existing insurer. No great surprise there.
I gave it a while to mull over, and read the new insurer’s cover in detail. Compared to the old one it’s actually rather more comprehensive. For just over half the price! OK, let’s order this one, and cancel the old one.
The renewal notice from the old one has a freephone line. So I ‘phoned it, and after a couple of menus I was through to a customer service person. He was of course keen to quote me the best deal (and was perfectly pleasant about it) so I agreed to let him give me a quote. When he mentioned a very low excess, my reaction was one of Good Lord! In that case I should’ve claimed when my friend’s dog ripped my coat! Before that conversation it hadn’t even crossed my mind to claim on insurance for that.
His reaction was instant and clearly automatic: I should have been able to claim against my friend’s insurance. Yep, it’s all about shifting liability. My reaction was a slightly-horrified What? It’s hardly something to go around suing my friends over!
Two different mindsets, and the insurers win because people don’t claim. But what if I got over my instinctive revulsion at the idea of suing my friend? Just treated it as a business transaction: no hard feelings, no guilt? That’s what I should be doing in my insurer’s world! They’re pushing us into being cold, calculating, and ruthless. Discounting such nebulous irrelevancies as friendship.
From where I sit, that’s a big hurdle to making a claim. But if I were to cross that hurdle, surely the logical next step is on to fraud, as in let’s just lump in existing damage or wear-and-tear with what the dog did[1]. That step is surely much smaller than the hurdle I’ve crossed to claim against my friend. And from there it’s small steps to much bigger fraud.
It seems a logical conclusion that insurers have only themselves to blame when they suffer large scale fraud, such as staged car accidents. They’ve trained us to think that way!
Oh, and yes I did switch my home insurance. As well as my stuff (which I’m unlikely to claim for unless I suffer catastrophic loss like a big fire or burglary), it explicitly covers things like tenant liability if I were to burn down my landlord’s property, and of course the usual third-party things if I were held liable for something while out walking or cycling.
[1] there wasn’t any with the coat in question, which was brand new just a week earlier. But that’s not the point!
niq's soapbox 