Insurance News
A new study conducted by researchers from the American Cancer Society explored the financial implications that cancer survivors need to contend with and how health insurance plays a role.
According to the researchers, struggling to understand health insurance policies or medical bills is rather common. In these instances, that stress can spill out into financial decisions that aren’t medical, as well as into other areas of life.
“Growing evidence suggests that health in...
Car insurance customers who purchase the bare minimum coverage required by their state pay a higher rate when they upgrade insurance policies.
That’s the conclusion of a Consumer Federation of America (CFA) analysis that compared premium quotes from six companies in several cities for consumers who bought the least coverage and those who purchased more extensive coverage.
“Auto insurance is not just mandatory in most states, it is an important asset protection tool,” sai...
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Sick, elderly, and/or poor people who actually need health insurance are ruining Obamacare for the rest of us, if a common mantra of the health insurance industry is to be believed.
While not wording it quite as harshly, the health insurance industry has said that Affordable Care Act customers are making heavy use of medical services, more than the industry anticipated, costing health insurance companies revenue and explaining next year’s premium increases.
People who nee...
Whether it's total devastation from a hurricane like Harvey, or a personal disaster like a fire, or even a tree falling through the roof, most insured homeowners are eager to get their hands on an insurance check.
It's understandable, of course, but Michael Perlmuter, who heads a company representing policyholders in insurance claims settlements, advises patience. Homeowners, he says, should resist the temptation to accept the first settlement offer from an insurance com...
Progressive Insurance is airing an extensive ad campaign promoting its Snapshot device, promoting it as a way to cut your auto insurance bills. It sounds good, but it might not work out for everyone.
The humorous commercials warn of “rate suckers,” those bad drivers who get speeding tickets, get into accidents, and cut you off on the freeway. The commercials point out those bad drivers are why your insurance rates are so high.
But essentially, that's how insurance works. ...
The groups called for Congress to reject the study and ban the use of credit scoring in insurance.
Insurance credit scoring is the use by insurers of consumers credit reports for determining insurance eligibility and premiums. Unknown to most consumers, insurers use of consumer credit information has spread to almost all insurers and is one of the most important factors in determining how much a consumer pays for auto or homeowners insurance.
Previous studies by the Missou...
Forty-nine percent of people overall, and 43 percent of people with insurance said they were somewhat to completely unprepared to cope with a costly medical emergency over the coming year.
Some 16 percent had no health plan at all, including many working respondents whose jobs didnt offer insurance or who couldnt afford the premiums of deductibles of the available plan.
When added to the population of uninsured -- approximately 16% of the population -- a total of 40% of ...
A bail bondsman or bail agent is one of those people you hope you never need, but if you do, where do you look? The Internet of course, right?
That's where we look for a lot of different services these days, but doing a blind search isn't always the best way to distinguish which service or company is best. And that's certainly the case when it comes to finding a good bail agent.
"The reality is that there really isn't an established set of criteria for saying that one bai...
Allstate ranks as the worst insurer for consumers, according to a comprehensive investigation of thousands of legal documents and financial filings by the American Association for Justice, a trial lawyers' group.
The group said it based its rankings on what it found to be "a distinct pattern of insurance industry greed" among 10 companies that do everything possible to avoid paying claims, employ hardball tactics against policyholders, reward executives with extrava...
The idea behind an annuity is that, in exchange for an upfront investment, it guarantees you an agreed-upon income for the rest of your life. But annuities have never sold as well as most economists think they should and no one seems to know why.
Two Boston College marketing professors say they think they have found the answer: people don't like to think about dying.
This doesn't appear to make sense on the surface. After all, the whole idea of an annuity is that it keeps you from outliving your money -- no small concern in an era when people are routinely living into their 90s. You may be old, tired, sick, or whatever, but at least you have a few bucks coming in each month. But the process of setting up an annuity forces you to think about how long you have left and therein lies the rub, says Gergana Nenkov, Associate Professor of Marketing with the Carroll School of Management at Boston College.
"When you think about an annuity, you have to think about how long you have left to live, how many years you need to finance," says Nenkov. "You have to think about dying -- that's part of the annuity process, and when people do that, it turns them away."
Hoping it goes away
Previous explanations for Americans' poor record of annuity purchases have focused on low retirement savings, unfair pricing, and decreased flexibility in accessing one's money.
Nenkov and fellow BC professor Linda Court Salisbury say they applied psychological theory to answer the question that's usually posed in economic terms.
"Nobody has ever looked at it from the psychology of making the decision and going through with the decision," says Salisbury. "Our idea was the averseness of thinking about your own death is enough to make you use what we call 'mortality salience defense strategy,' which is to avoid it."
In other words, by not thinking about death and not planning for it, we're hoping it will go away. The theory was supported in four studies that included 748 adults.
One study asked participants whether they would rather roll their retirement savings in an Individual Retirement Account, or purchase an annuity.
"When people considered an IRA, very few thought about dying or how long they have left to live," says Nenkov. "But when the people considered an annuity, a big proportion of them had those kinds of thoughts related to death."
Two of the studies presented participants with annuity descriptions that contained subtle differences. One description indicated the annuity "guaranteed payments for as long as you live," while another "guaranteed payments for as long as you live until you die." Whenever an annuity mentioned death, interest plummeted.
"We showed that even those subtle mentions of death decreased further the rate of choosing an annuity and made people stay away from the product even more than if we just talked about years left to live," says Nenkov.
It's not just annuities, of course.
"Wills, life insurance, estate planning -- all of those decisions are sometimes put off, and we think this issue of not wanting to think about death has a role," says Nenkov. "Maybe finding ways to deal with that anxiety could help consumers overcome it and make the important decisions because if they don't, there are devastating consequences later in life."
The idea behind an annuity is that, in exchange for an upfront investment, it guarantees you an agreed-upon income for the rest of your life. But annuities have never sold as well as most economists think they should and no one seems to know why.
Two Boston College marketing professors say they think they have found the answer: people don't like to think about dying.
This doesn't appear to make sense on the surface. After all, the whole idea of an annuity is that it keep...
If you've decided to pick up some extra cash driving for Uber, Lyft, or any of the other so-called transportation network companies (TNC), you'll need to review your auto insurance.
Your personal auto policy may not cover you while transporting passengers you picked up through a ridesharing app; in most cases it won't.
As ridesharing became a market force in the last few years, auto insurance companies responded by creating hybrid policies that are more than personal poli...
There is an all too familiar scenario for home purchasers and refinancers that has consistently been one of the major mortgage-related consumer complaints to state and federal agencies for the past few years -- title insurance trickery and "good faith estimates" of settlement costs that turn out to be hundreds (if not thousands) of dollars off the mark.
At least ten states are investigating alleged title insurance fraud. These investigations involve not only a numbe...
California's health exchange has been one of the biggest and most successful state Obamacare programs. But today, Covered California, as it's known, announced an average statewide premium increase of 13.2 percent for 2017, setting off a round of criticism and defensive responses.
“These outrageous premium hikes are the consequence of California’s failure to adopt health insurance premium regulation like the majority of the states and the disappearance of federal subsidies for insurance companies to even out bumps in the road ,” said Jamie Court, president of Consumer Watchdog, which sponsored an unusccessful rate regulation initiative in 2014.
Insurance companies said the rate hikes -- more than three times the increases of the last two years -- were the result of factors beyond their control.
“In 2017, Covered California prices are influenced by higher spending on medical care, particularly skyrocketing prices on specialty drugs, and the sunset of two federal programs," said California Association of Health Plans President & CEO Charles Bacchi.
“California’s health exchange opened up access to health care for millions, with 11 health plans in Covered California competing over price and quality and in most of the regions of the state," Bacchi said.
“Some rate increases are necessary to cover the cost of care as more and more Californians use medical services that have become increasingly expensive each year. As prices for hospitals, doctors, specialty drugs and other services keep climbing, we cannot lose focus on our goal of affordability,” he said.
"Regulation is the hammer"
But Consumer Watchdog, a nonprofit based in Santa Monica, said the increases could have been avoided if the rate regulation initiative had passed.
“When three health insurance companies control 90% of the market there is no bargaining with them absent a hammer. Rate regulation is the hammer," Court said. "California consumers cannot continue to pay more for very limited doctors and hospital networks. Rate regulation needs to move to the top of the legislature’s list.”
The ballot initiative failed to pass in a record-low turnout election, but it garnered 41% of the vote despite a $57 million insurance company campaign against it, Court noted.
The federal programs that are being phased out were intended to help stabilize the market during the first few years of the Affordable Care Act (ACA).
How much more individual consumers will have to pay depends on whether they are eligible for taxpayer-supported subsidies and whether they choose to switch to lower-cost plans that may have higher deductibles and co-pays.
California's health exchange has been one of the biggest and most successful state Obamacare programs. But today, Covered California, as it's known, announced an average statewide premium increase of 13.2 percent for 2017, setting off a round of criticism and defensive responses.
“These outrageous premium hikes are the consequence of California’s failure to adopt health insurance premium regulation like the majority of the states and the disappearance of federal subsidie...
GEICO has filed suit against two major Internet search engine operators, Google Inc. and Overture Services Inc., in an effort to suppress advertising by competing insurance companies and online insurance brokers.
GEICO is claiming trademark infringement, alleging that the search engine operators violate trademark rights by allowing other insurance companies to advertise to consumers who display an interest in obtaining information relating in some way to GEICO by using th...
Liberty Mutual spends a lot of money advertising its "accident forgiveness" feature, which promises consumers that under certain conditions, they can escape premium increases even if they have an accident:
Accident Forgiveness is a policy benefit where Liberty Mutual won’t raise your rate due to your first car accident if you’ve been accident-free and violation-free for 5 years.
The only problem is that a lot of those ads run in California, where the accident forgiveness...
Northern California’s record-breaking wildfires have already claimed more than 20 lives and razed a landscape encompassing thousands of homes and businesses, and long-term effects of this disaster–particularly in agricultural industries–are just beginning to take shape.
The state's wine and cannabis industries face devastating repercussions. Each represents hundreds of thousands of jobs and billions in revenue, but only the former has access to insurance on their crops. ...
The National Fire Protection Association (NFPA) says the number of fires started by cigarettes increased 19 percent in the most recent year studied. It's urging more states and cities to follow New York's lead in requiring that cigarettes be designed to stop burning when they're not being actively smoked.
New York is the only state that has passed the cigarette safety law. Starting in June 2004, cigarettes sold in New York must be self-extinguishing and all cigarette bra...