The helpful woman on the phone was as perplexed as I was.
“I’m way past the stage in life when I might need maternity cover, child development services or fertility treatment, so why am I paying for them?” I had inquired.
“I know,” she sighed, wearily. “You should hear some of the calls I get from men about this.”
“If I cut out those items from my cover, how much would the policy cost?”
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“You can’t cut them out,” she explained. “It’s all or nothing.”
“In that case, should I switch to a different plan?”
“No, this is the best one for you,” she assured me.
I hung up, my head stewed with visions of grizzled gents clutching their Plan XX policies in the queue for breastfeeding classes in Holles Street.
Yes, private health insurance is elitist but, as one ages, it can be harder to forgo than caffeine. This is especially true when the longest waiting time in the wait-riddled health service is for Sláintecare’s promised single-tier access. Meanwhile, people get sick.
I resorted to my insurance after the umpteenth six-monthly letter from the hospital asking if I still wanted to continue waiting on the public patients’ list to have my parathyroid glands removed. The guilt proved easier to live with than the daily exhaustion, the osteoporosis and the pebbles crystallising in my kidneys from a calcium overload in my bloodstream.
[ Why health insurance price hikes may cost you more than you thinkOpens in new window ]
If the batty terms of your health cover don’t have you reaching for the sedatives, just wait for your car insurance renewal notice to arrive. The price seems to jump by another €50 every year, despite a raft of legal reforms that the sector promised would lower prices when they lobbied politicians to introduce them. The cost of cover keeps jumping while the value of the car keeps plunging as it stands stationary outside the front door.
Motorists are a captive market. The law demands, for the public good, that all road-going vehicles must be insured but the public good seldom seems the insurers’ priority. On Monday, Conor Pope wrote in this newspaper about a young mother whose husband, the named driver on her policy, died within the past 12 months. Her insurer quoted €245 more to renew her cover than the €415 she was charged last year. When she queried the 59 per cent increase, she was told she had lost her “spouse discount”. As if it was her fault, a response evoking Lady Bracknell’s callous dismissal of bereavement as “carelessness”.
The rules can be so nonsensical as to drive the customer round the bend, although, when you study the small print, you’ll find that consequence is not covered by your policy. These unanticipated inflexibilities are not accidental. They are designed to boost insurers’ profits. A survey of civil and commercial organisations by the Alliance for Insurance Reform found most respondents were paying higher premiums for reduced cover due to inbuilt exclusions and increased excess-payment rates.
Mortgage-holders comprise another captive market as lending institutions oblige their customers to take out life policies to secure their borrowings. Then they must insure their homes.
As Ireland’s climate deteriorates, residents in areas prone to flooding are being denied insurance for their homes. Risk is the raison d’être of the insurance business. Citing it as a reason to refuse cover seems as logical as the – probably apocryphal – county council that built a windowless house for a blind man on the premise that he could not see the view.
Even if you reside atop a hill in a state of perpetual weather clemency, you may struggle to find home cover if you are silly enough to live in a house with a roof that is more than 30 per cent flat. Horror stories about flat roofed houses being flooded are so last century. Modern materials and construction regulations have ameliorated much of that risk. Insurers’ intransigence in either refusing cover or adding loadings to the premium, limit architectural variety in a landscape long blighted by bungalow bliss. It also militates against the green dream of sedum roofs that benefit biodiversity and reduce CO2 emissions.
Insurance provision – or the lack of it – frequently surfaces in public debate as an obstruction to the smooth-running of this country. Whether it is crèches closing down in recent years because of rising premiums or certain facilities being removed from civic spaces because of public liability or homes and shops being denied cover against flooding, it crops up time and again.
The situation is not helped by Ireland’s litigiousness and its astronomical legal fees that even judges have criticised, having risen through the Law Library system themselves. If insurers’ lobbyists are not complaining about legal costs, they are blaming vehicle repair costs.
It is five years since the Judicial Council adopted detailed guidelines for personal injury awards, precipitating substantial reductions in the numbers and the value of claims. Yet, insurance prices keep spiralling. The Dáil was told last year that motor insurance prices had risen by 11.2 per cent in the preceding 12 months, more than four times the inflation rate.
“Insurance companies in this State are making profits far in excess of industry norms at the expense of workers, families, businesses and community groups,” Sinn Féin’s finance spokesman Pearse Doherty said in the Dáil last September.
The Government published its action plan for insurance reform last July. Among its stated aims are to provide transparency, affordability and climate protection. Since January 1st this year, the insurance compensation fund levy has been halved to 1 per cent, a move the Government promised would “lead to saving of approximately €57 million for policy holders on renewal”.
My renewal notice arrived this month. The price is up another €56.46. Same insurance company, same no claims status, same zero penalty points and same mind-boggling complexity of terms and exclusions. Just another year.
