Finance and Business

Let’s start off with a simple explanation of why fraud costs us all money. Insurance companies employ people called actuaries. They spend their time calculating how many traffic accidents there are likely to be and predicting how much all the claims will be worth in a year. That total is divided among all the policy holders as the premium. It’s all guesswork but they are good guessers. Except that, when thousands of people make false claims, the insurers suddenly find themselves short of money to pay out. What is the result we see? Premium rates go up for all.

How bad is the problem? In New York, the number of suspected cases of fraud has risen by one-third from 2007 through 2009. Across the state, the insurers identified 13,433 probable cases of fraud in 2009 alone. To pay for this, the premium rates rose by an average of 6.3% in 2009. The most common frauds are staging an accident to claim medical expenses. This has caused the average value of each claim to rise to more than double the national average. That’s millions of dollars paid out and millions of dollars that have to replaced in the capital reserves. This problem is not, of course, unique to New York. It has become a well-recognized way of raising cash as the recession has deepened. So, if people find their household budgets under pressure, they can report their vehicle stolen or become the victim in a phantom hit-and-run.

Ah, but you are saying all this needs support from attorneys and physicians prepared to push claims knowing or suspecting their clients are faking or exaggerating. Well, let’s keep this real. The FBI and local law enforcement agencies regularly run undercover sting operations to catch the fraudulent. In Philadelphia, for example, a recent operation resulted in long jail terms for an attorney and thirty-four individuals falsely claiming millions based on fake medical evidence. In Santa Clara County, California, the police recently prosecuted more than twenty body shops for supplying false estimates to insurance companies. An undercover officer driving an undamaged Honda Civic explained he had reported the vehicle vandalized to pay for a new paint job. The body shops supplied an estimate under $3,000 – insurance companies do not inspect damage for “small” claims. Read the rest of this entry »

This is the word you see most often when insurance companies talk about the best way to get a reduction in your premium rates. All you have to do, the smooth voice says, is increase the deductible and we’ll give you a 10% discount. And, it’s a fact. It sounds like a good deal. So why are insurance companies so keen for you to increase the deductible? The answer could not be more simple. Whatever deductible you sign up for is the amount you pay if you are involved in a traffic accident or incur a liability of some kind connected with your ownership of a vehicle. That means you pay and not the insurance company. For insurer this is a cool idea. You insure yourself. All the premium pays for is cover in case your losses amount to more than the deductible. This is really great. The insurer collects a premium and you pay the first however many dollars of the claim. Since the majority of claims are for small amounts – fender benders rarely cost that much to repair – the insurer is on a winner. In fact, the bigger the deductible you sign up to accept, the better off the insurance company is. OK, the company does give you a discount, but it’s rarely an adequate amount.

Let’s see how it works out. Suppose you opt to pay the first $1,000 of every claim and the insurer gives you a 10% discount, are your savings $83 a month? If they are and you are unlucky enough to have an accident at the end of the year, you will have broken even. Your $1,000 in savings just got paid out as a lump sum at the end of the year. Except, of course, there’s a Parkinson’s Law of money in operation – spending wipes out money available. In other words, we usually spend what we have. This leaves you without savings and so that cash sum has to go on your credit card with interest until you can pay it off. In reality, most people end up out of pocket if they have to pay the deductible on one accident. Now imagine the case if your luck is really bad and you have two accidents in the same year. Do you really have $2,000 lying around on the off chance of two insurance claims? Read the rest of this entry »

Lets start off with a simple explanation of how insurance works. In the good old days before those kind men got together in the Lloyds coffee shop, people were responsible for their own losses. If the horse pulled their cart into a ditch and this broke the wheel, the owner had to put his hands into his pock’ets (which fortunately had already been invented) and pay someone to repair the wheel. But once people could share the risks, life was suddenly better. If you gather together a big enough group of cart owners, each will only have to pay a small amount into the central fund to cover the losses of the few who have accidents. Those men at Lloyds were on to a winning business formula. Moving into modern times, the idea of spreading the risk is the same and, with thousands of people in each group, the cost of loss is divided into small premiums. But, with profits under pressure, the insurance companies came up with a new variation on the old theme. Suppose they could persuade their customers to accept the risk of some of their losses. This would then become self-insurance for part of the risk. The rest would be paid by the insurance companies. So the deductible was born. You agree to pay the first portion of any loss. In the case of traffic accidents, most of the fender benders are minor and don’t cost much to repair. That means you pay for most of the repairs yourself and the insurance companies get richer. Ironically, if no-one opted for the deductible, the increase in the premium for everyone in the group would be trivial.

So let’s get to an actual example to see how it works. If you agree to accept a deductible of $1,000, you will be given a discount on the premium. Say you save 10% over the year. Now that’s a good saving if you manage to get through the year without having an accident. But suppose your luck is not good and you have an accident. The bill for repairs is $900. You put your hand in your pocket (pockets are such useful things – always seeming to have money in them) and pull out the dollars. Was your 10% saving over the year more than $900? If not, you are making a loss, not just on the insurance policy but, if you had to use your credit card, on the interest added to the $900 until it is paid off. What would happen if your run of bad luck continued and you had a second accident in the year? Do you have another $1,000 as savings or available to borrow? Perhaps we should not be so pessimistic. Worst case scenarios are always better applied to other people and never to you. Read the rest of this entry »