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New Medical Insurance Premium Comparison

The new medical insurance premium comparison is now on Tableau server and in the Premium Comparison Dropbox. It has the following changes:

• Update to Partners Life rates effective 31/12/18.
• Update to nib rates effective 1/1/19.
• Update to Sovereign policy fee effective 1/1/19
• Update to Accuro rates effective 1/3/19 (but being publicly quoted from 31/1/19)

Accuro Pricing Change

Accuro have a price change on their SmartCare and SmartCare+ range effective from 1 March 2019. The rates will be slightly increasing by about 2% and will be reflected on Accuro's website from the 31st of January due to quotes being valid for 30 days.

 

Consumer Magazine on Health Insurers

Recently the Consumer Magazine released its latest health insurance report. Consumer identified Accuro as having significantly higher proportion of happy customers than its six competitors - congratulation to Accuro. Click here to read more.

ANZIIF New Zealand Insurance Industry Awards Winners

Last night the 7th ANZIIF New Zealand Insurance Industry Awards were held at Sky City in Auckland.

Congratulations to Fidelity Life who took home the Life Insurance Company of the Year and Accuro Health Insurance who walked away with the Innovation of the Year award.

Click here to view winners of all categories.

Geoff Annals on conduct obligations

Geoff Annals, CEO of Accuro, the health insurer, has made the clearest statement yet by any insurer on a shared view of responsibility for client outcomes.Illustrated in this quote, by talking about servicing requirements:

“Our remuneration should reflect that. That’s one of the things insurers can be criticised for. If we remunerate without requiring evidence that the service we expect has been delivered, we should be in the gun, too."

or a goodreturns article, at this link.

Previously companies have tended to act in a way which suggested a very clear demarcation between the insurer and the adviser. That view was a split between the client experience between product and service performance (provided by the insurer) and advice (provided by the adviser).

The view is effectively a recognition of the various legal contracts that underpin the commercial arrangements. Clients have a contract with the insurer, the insurer is not involved in the arrangement that the client may or may not have with the adviser. The adviser's role with the insurer is defined in their agency agreement. This split is widely reflected in the split in law, but it is not as clear-cut as it is sometimes represented. Whether insurers like it or not, advisers are their agent when it comes to the point of application. In other respects the boundaries may be blurred as well, such as when an adviser makes a mistake in good faith, and the insurer handles resolution - cancelling contracts from inception and returning monies paid, for example.

The discussion about conduct is drawing some areas previously dealt with by assumptions and expectations into the daylight, and is perhaps demanding that they should be made explicit. Perhaps there should be explicit service obligations. If a significant portion of the client's experience of a product is based on a service the adviser will provide, then maybe the adviser and the insurer should agree what that service looks like.

The potential upside for advisers here is clarity in their centrality of their role to the operation of the product. On the flip side of that, insurers may wish to operate two channels - one where they are happy with transactional introductions, and another where they want a genuine partnership with advisers.

Medical Excess Options on Quotemonster

Here is a table of the excess options available for each health insurer and the ones we use on Quotemonster for Specialist & Tests.

Quality Product Research Update: V105

We have just uploaded QPRV105 onto Quotemonster and have also distributed it to all other subscribers. This version includes the following changes:

1. Momentum Life added for Life
2. AIA Business TPD, Trauma
3. Accuro update to Smartcare and Smartcare+
4. Income Protection review changes
5. All funeral providers updated
6. Review Funeral Cover item

Probably the most significant change is to income protection. You will note a narrowing of the range from the top to the bottom of income protection scores, due to reduction of the incidence rates for a series of secondary cover items. 

Accuro Launches Online Underwriting for Direct

Accuro has announced automated underwriting for their direct health insurance sales using the services of Intelligent Life, best known for developing the underwriting systems of Pinnacle Life. From Accuro's release:

Kiwi Innovation - World First Provides Instant Health Cover for New Zealanders

05 September 2017, Wellington

A Kiwi innovation is delivering instant healthcare cover for individuals, a service not available until now. A New Zealand and world first, the online service has been launched today by Accuro Health Insurance, a New Zealand owned not for profit health insurance provider.

“With waiting times getting longer and tight DHB budgets, it is becoming harder for Kiwis to receive all the essential health care they need, when they need it. That’s where health insurance comes in,” says Geoff Annals, CEO of Accuro.

“Until now, even if it was easy to get a generic instant quote, buying health insurance meant filling in lots of forms and extra questions. Then usually there was a wait for days until you found out what your health insurance policy would actually cover and what it would cost. And until you signed-up your acceptance of the offer you were still not actually covered. Phew!”

“With this new service, called HUGO, anyone can complete a simple guided questionnaire online and in many cases will get an instant, fully underwritten, personalised offer and cover that starts from the moment they click their acceptance,” Geoff Annals says. “That’s not only much quicker and much easier. It also takes away a lot of the worry and uncertainty.”

The key to the service, named HUGO (Health Underwriting Goes live), is a new intelligent underwriting engine. This guides users through a series of simple questions, but ‘under the hood’ is a complex system that only asks the questions needed, saving on pages of form filling, while going into detail where necessary. 

 “This new automated analysis and underwriting system is something previously in the ‘too hard basket’ for health insurance, with many thousands of possible combinations. It is far more complex than life or car insurance, for example,” says Ed Saul, Director at Intelligent Life, the New Zealand company specialising in developing innovative solutions for the life and health insurance industry. “There’s a lot of business intelligence behind delivering such a simple to use system.”

A significant proportion of applicants will be able to access an instant offer and cover for their healthcare insurance. Applications identified by the intelligent underwriting system as possibly requiring extra attention will be sent to an experienced, human underwriter.

“The innovation also allows us to respond faster and better than ever before. And it means our skilled underwriters are freed up to spend more time on to the more complex applications so these applications can also be responded to faster and better while the automated system instantly handles applications that used to clog our underwriters’ in-trays,” adds Geoff Annals.

 

Accuro and Quotemonster Launch new Online Application Process

Accuro has become the first health insurer in the world to offer a fully underwritten product with an entirely online application process. This new process is only available to Accuro’s financial advisers using QuoteMonster. The application form is entirely online and the process delivers Accuro an electronic application that has been pre-underwritten through the platform. The process significantly speeds up the end-to-end application process for financial advisers, which benefits the customer, the financial adviser and Accuro.

It enables an adviser using Quotemonster to offer an end-to-end process from initial scope of engagement, through market research, comparison, and recommendation, to application with the insurer.

 

Stand-alone Medical Policies for Children - UPDATED

Susan Edmunds asked us to investigate which companies will allow stand-alone medical policies for children. We hadn't thought of this use case before, but logically, it is useful. What if the parents are unable to buy health cover - perhaps they are un-insurable, or simply cannot afford it, or this is a case of a child being raised by an elderly grandparent? We checked around: apparently two insurers offer the cover without requiring an adult life to be part of the policy. Accuro and Sovereign. 

UPDATE: nib has been in contact again and they can do standalone medical policies for children too, the policy owner can have no cover - so long as an adult owns the contract, they can be uninsurable, and still buy cover for children.