Insurance Scam

For any one type of risk, over a timescale the number of events and the costs to settle are averaged out and for a given pool of contributors the premium necessary to make a profit and pay out on the claims that will arise are calculated. Some years will be good with few and small claims and some years will be bad with many or very expensive claims. Just like roulette, over a period of time the banker, or in this case insurance companies, will always win because that is how the figures are stacked up. Fine.

Not content to make the just profit they anticipated increasingly nowadays the insurance companies are now arranging to cream off more than just a fair share of profits. If you tilt the average occurrence of events in your favour, by for example excluding know frequent or costly occurring events, cracking or water ingress in a property, young drivers or cancer, they win hands down. Just like stacking good cards into a hand, they can even further improve their profits by playing hardball with the small print, "fully reveal whatever reasonably might influence decision to insure", "only securely locked and alarmed premises or cars are insured against a break-in", "providing you have never ever discussed with your Doctor any health issue are you insured for a health problem". Even worse still, having put every word and clause firmly into their favour now, if you have to claim, your renewal premium will go through the roof, forget about protected no-claims discounts, in todays world they have become meaningless.

Is it so unreasonable that when an insured person experiences something extra-ordinary they should be able to claim in a supportive, not openly hostile and adversarial climate, for a speedy settlement, of, no more than what the words offered to do at the time the insurance taken out? Surely that is why they took out insurance, paid insurance premiums, all for the peace of mind that they are covered incase of the dreadful unexpected event actually occurring, even if, horrors of horrors, the event was triggered by an act human error. We do after all, all make mistakes from time to time and look to insurance to protect us from our own culpalbilty.

Now we know there are people who set out to abuse and claim for far more than their entitlement and make it their life's work to create and extort extravagant insurance claims. There are no doubt solicitors out there that will aide and abet them in their extortion. I fancy the insurance companies have the nonce and legal clout to see off multiple claims from self-evidently fraudsters but why should the ordinary man in the street be made to suffer and endure the harsh treatment metered out to cheats as if they too were a cheat.

It has reached such a pass where, if you have the misfortune to experience a claim event, your claim will be refuted, or even worse your insurance will be retrospectively invalidated, by hindsight manipulative interpretation of words, hiding behind a host of concepts such as "prior knowledge", "exclusions", "failure to follow notification procedures", "lack of corroborative evidence" or "failure to maintain or implement security".

A compassionate, supportive and a fair appraisal, all gone. Instead narrow and mean minded wriggles to find only the get out words and not that sympathetic look at the whole holistic picture. So instead we have total absence of certainty and full doubt whether the cover anticipated actually exists and will replace the loss. Why indeed pay the premiums, why take out insurance if, when it is needed, it fails to deliver the glowing all-embracing rosy promises of the insurance offer. Better off putting the premium money in a sinking fund and hoping your averages wont turn up for a few years, scarcely worse than taking out an insurance that, odds on, isn't going to pay out in anycase.