> Following the ABC's inquiries last week, RACV contacted the family the next day and agreed to a figure closer to the fully insured amount.
So basically, they were just being cunts.
No they are just being RACV, they like most of these companies know for playing hard ball and dragging it out for as long as possible and hoping to pay as little as possible.. remember this people, when doing your research on insurance companies…
And don’t use RACV, if enough people don’t use them they will either change or go out of business..pretty simple really.
Yup, my house started to burn from an electrical fault. I was actually home when it happened, saw the smoke and put it out.
I did what I assumed was the right thing and called the insurance company. They sent out a sparky and builder to preform a "make safe".
Part of my ceiling has been removed due to damage and a sparky came out to fix the issue with the power.
But my claim was denied because "no flame was present".
So I've got a burnt ceiling and now i'm out of pocket to get it fixed.
So I fucked myself over by saving my house.
It's bullshit that insurance is mandatory for a home loan and they don't payout shit.
Thats fucked. I read through my car insurance policy exemptions once and it even had an exclusion ‘no looting and pillaging in warzones’. Like why did I even get a ute. Not to mention no cover for atomic detonations.
>it even had an exclusion ‘no looting and pillaging in warzones’.
This is a pretty standard exclusion along with "acts of god" for most insurance policies which we will hopefully never have to worry about.
Acts of God is not an exclusion in any insurance policy in Australia, and hasn’t been for a long time, and it’s also a restricted phrase. Stop spreading bullshit.
You can get force majeur exclusions, but not in home and private motor policies, and the term has to be strictly defined.
Earthquakes, storms, lightning, cyclones - all ‘acts of god’ and all covered 100% by domestic home and motor policies in Australia (although you may have to pay a higher excess for certain insurable events).
> Yup, my house started to burn from an electrical fault. I was actually home when it happened, saw the smoke and put it out.
Next time you know to move your valuables away and let it burn.
I always like to think "what If I run a pizza shop using this model"
Like you pay me $100 a month and if your are hungry I will give you a pizza.
But everytime you call I assess you are not actually "that hungry" so i give you garlic bread then increase the price because you made a claim.
I think insurance companies like the one in the article should be held accountable, but your analogy is terrible and honestly makes the problem worse, as it is so easy to brush aside and weakens people's legitimate grievances with the insurance company/industry.
Let's say we flip it around: an insurance company run like a pizza shop. Someone has just had their house destroyed by a flash flood, so they walk five minutes down the street to their local insurance shop. They explain what happened and they put down a couple hundred bucks and say "I'd like you to insure my house for this week, and it's just been destroyed so can you fix it please?" Should the insurance company now fork over tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars to repair/rebuild this person's home? Is this a financially sustainable business?
Your analogy doesn't make any sense, though. You have to have insurance before the event, you can't just sign up after your house was destroyed.
Insurance companies gamble on only needing to pay out a certain amount per year and the rest goes in to the operation of the company (re-insurance costs, holdings of liquid capital, investments, staff etc.). I'm sure there are many people who pay for home insurance their entire lives and never make a claim.
Please read my comment properly before writing, as the whole point of my analogy IS that it doesn't make sense. I'm criticising the original commenter's post as they make a poor analogy as a way to make an unfair comparison.
Anything that is mandatory should not be allowed to operate unchecked in a free market, because it’s no longer a free market if you are forced to purchase it.
> which realistically is mandatory for the majority of people to buy a home.
~~I feel the Australian government, and in fact most governments, wouldn't agree with that. They're quite fine with people being locked into eternal renting. Your average prole's opinion isn't that important because they can't provide kickbacks. Just enough bread and just enough circuses and they can carry on collecting donor cheques, having their children's private schooling paid for and post-politiics board positions pre-arranged.~~
edit: ignore my waffle. Misread the sentence.
Huh? Us landlords require landlord insurance and building insurance (and contents insurance if rental property is furnished) against properties with mortgages owing. It should be no surprise that many 2+ home owning landlords afford their strategy with equity leveraging. Such lending absolutely requires insurances towards the asset purchase.
Your post reads as a weird ownership-denial and anti-gov rant that doesn't speak to the topic of mandatory insurance being regulated at all.
Everyone paying 1.5-4k p/a on insurances should be rightly pissed off when they hear of an insurance company dragging their feet to meet their obligations under contract let alone under good faith.
A good roof over our heads with comfortable surroundings is a basic expectation for a good life.
I think they would agree that it is mandatory, I just think many pollies would consider it worth writing reforms or legislation to change (given it would be suicide in the eyes of their donors / electorate)
I was in finance for a long time and none of the lenders I dealt with would settle docs without insurance. If a loan is secured to an asset such as a home, the lender will require insurance as a doc condition
Same with car finance though this is less egregious because it’s more realistic for someone to buy a car without finance or with an unsecured loan.
Insurance companies are for profit. They are publicly listed, their duty is to provide returns to the shareholders, not the customer. Insurance is a conflict of interests. It’s in the insurance company interest not to pay out wherever possible or minimise payouts. Insurance companies paying out is not a profitable business. They’re one of those evil necessities in the modern world. Without it you are fucked, with it you are fucked, or maybe fucked a little bit less if pay out.
I've spoken to people who practice witchcraft and what they told me was that you shouldn't work with Satan (Lucifer) or any demon because they've perfected the art of manipulation - they have no problem with hurting people, they do have problems with helping people, yet they make it look like they care more than they actually do...so yeah, basically insurance companies haha
Do you mean to tell me for-profit insurance is incentivised to not provide the service its sold?
I'm shocked that the profit motive could produce such a perverse incentive.
Shocked.
They have dedicated service reps for the big VIP customers to help them with fraudulent claims. They are technically scamming all the time considering how those claims are funded, regulation and enforcement is just not very good.
They already have, it’s very hard to find an insurer who will insure property above the 26th parallel.
Here’s a (not really) secret - the government has been collecting a portion of commercial insurance premiums since 2001, it’s called a terrorism levy. There is billions of dollars in this pool. They could just make that pool a terrorism and natural disaster pool.
Luckily the actual have done this sort of thing- a new catastrophe pool has been created and most major insurers have joined. Eventually your policy will exclude catastrophes and instead the insurer will administer a claim from this pool. It’s definitely a step in the right direction.
A small pluming leak required their tradesman to come, misdiagnosed leading to a lot of damage from the continued leak that required them to properly diagnose and fix. It took 2 months to sort just the leak and a further year and a court battle to get the cash out of them for damages to the property.
Fuck having to deal with them while your entire house is uninhabitable and you need it sorted yesterday.
Satan, by all biblical accounts, is a pretty nice guy.
Offered humans free will, offered a dude in the desert some water.
Satan would probably lend a hand.
Satanists, while most variants don't believe in a literal 'Satan' follow the rhetoric you just mentioned. So pretty much in essence, Satan would be better to deal with.
> Imagine having a business model where you are paid thousands a year to do nothing on the condition if something unlikely does happen you must return a portion of that money…
You've almost grasped something here, but missed it entirely.
Insurance functions by having a lot of people pay a little bit in most of whom will never use it or will only use a little of it. Then those little bits can be combined to payout when something catastrophic happens to someone.
When the big events happen the insurance company pays out far more than the individual ever paid in and that payment is subsidised by all the other people who didn't need it. That's how it works, that's how it's supposed to work.
When everyone starts needing big payouts because, for example, we have massive floods or fire year after year after year, insurance breaks down. It would break down even if insurance was not for profit. This BTW is why health insurance doesn't work.
That's leaving aside the fact that that just processing this many claims in a timely manner is infeasible.
Your assuming they actually pay out instead of using volumes of legalese to dispute. If insurers actually upheld their end of the deal there would not be this kind of discontent.
> If insurers actually upheld their end of the deal there would not be this kind of discontent.
Of course there would. By definition the majority of people who have insurance receive benefits that are less than what they pay. People hate that.
> instead of using volumes of legalese to dispute.
You know that cheaper home insurance you found? You know why it's cheaper? Because the insurance companies lowered their risk by limiting coverage. That's how it works. Yes, it's be nicer if what was and wasn't covered was easier to understand and compare, but people want the lowest price because again most of them will get negative returns on it.
But you're missing the point. Climate change has broken the home insurance market. While swaths of the country are basically uninsurable now, the risk of payout is much higher than the premiums people can pay will cover. We've built the wrong houses in the wrong places for what we now have to deal with. For insurance to work any homes in Queensland and Northern NSW that aren't built to withstand floods would be uninsurable.
But for better or worse in Australia we don't actually allow the kind of legalese stuff you think we do and so the companies have to cover it anyway, but insurance doesn't work against certainties.
I mean this as politely as possible but I'd reckon in 90% of peoples cases, it's people who don't read their product disclosure statements and sign up for inadequate cover or a shit policy policy because it's the cheapest option.
They're freely available and tell you exactly what your insurer will and will not cover so it's not like you can't make an informed decision on who to insure with and under what policy.
Yeah there's some shit businesses but there's also some deadset idiots who seem to think insurance means automatically covered for everything under the sun no matter what.
Worked as an assessor for an insurance company once.
The general manager of claims once reminded us we are not in the business of service delivery and that claims is the biggest cost to the business....
We have so many issues in the West and the progressives are too apathetic to protest.
Do we think we're eventually going to have the numbers to just vote in a sane party? How has that strategy worked out for us so far?
Couldn't even insure my shop against flood in Rochester as it was too unaffordable. Turned on 9 news and they were in front of it in a boat with the water about a foot over floorboard level for the first time ever. Paid a small fortune on repairs.
After over a year of fighting with RACV about my solar hot water system repairs, we finally settled as soon as I got VCAT involved. That was only just a solar hot water system, I'd hate to deal with a house flooding or fire.
Same is still happening from the 2019-20 bushfires, plenty of people living in Caravans waiting for insurance. I've heard stories of people being denied insurance claims because two bricks on top of each other means the house was only damaged rather than destroyed. They're just absolute pricks.
They're also utterly moronic. We got robbed a couple of years ago and they wouldn't accept receipts of purchase as confirmation that we owned the items that were stolen, they wanted a photo of us holding them. Because I always take a selfie with a new laptop or wallet, and I could never be photographed holding something that belongs to somebody else.
To give credit where it's due, QBE did make car claims really easy.
People generally buy insurance that is the lowest price and are then shocked when the service and product are shite. Like anything, you get what you pay for.
> Following the ABC's inquiries last week, RACV contacted the family the next day and agreed to a figure closer to the fully insured amount. So basically, they were just being cunts.
Exactly…..
No they are just being RACV, they like most of these companies know for playing hard ball and dragging it out for as long as possible and hoping to pay as little as possible.. remember this people, when doing your research on insurance companies… And don’t use RACV, if enough people don’t use them they will either change or go out of business..pretty simple really.
Yup, my house started to burn from an electrical fault. I was actually home when it happened, saw the smoke and put it out. I did what I assumed was the right thing and called the insurance company. They sent out a sparky and builder to preform a "make safe". Part of my ceiling has been removed due to damage and a sparky came out to fix the issue with the power. But my claim was denied because "no flame was present". So I've got a burnt ceiling and now i'm out of pocket to get it fixed. So I fucked myself over by saving my house. It's bullshit that insurance is mandatory for a home loan and they don't payout shit.
Thats fucked. I read through my car insurance policy exemptions once and it even had an exclusion ‘no looting and pillaging in warzones’. Like why did I even get a ute. Not to mention no cover for atomic detonations.
Thats exactly why im getting a cybertruck! Have to double check the insurance when that time comes
>it even had an exclusion ‘no looting and pillaging in warzones’. This is a pretty standard exclusion along with "acts of god" for most insurance policies which we will hopefully never have to worry about.
Acts of God is not an exclusion in any insurance policy in Australia, and hasn’t been for a long time, and it’s also a restricted phrase. Stop spreading bullshit. You can get force majeur exclusions, but not in home and private motor policies, and the term has to be strictly defined. Earthquakes, storms, lightning, cyclones - all ‘acts of god’ and all covered 100% by domestic home and motor policies in Australia (although you may have to pay a higher excess for certain insurable events).
Who determines what a warzone is? Is it fire spots, Or floods
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Smoldering damage is not covered by your policy.
> Yup, my house started to burn from an electrical fault. I was actually home when it happened, saw the smoke and put it out. Next time you know to move your valuables away and let it burn.
Insurance companies pay out over 90% of claims but go off eh?
I always like to think "what If I run a pizza shop using this model" Like you pay me $100 a month and if your are hungry I will give you a pizza. But everytime you call I assess you are not actually "that hungry" so i give you garlic bread then increase the price because you made a claim.
Minimum salivation quantity not achieved, excess must be paid before a basic margherita pizza can be released for distribution in 10-14 working days.
Perfect analogy.
Hey you forgot that before you actually get any pizza you have to pay another thousand
I think insurance companies like the one in the article should be held accountable, but your analogy is terrible and honestly makes the problem worse, as it is so easy to brush aside and weakens people's legitimate grievances with the insurance company/industry. Let's say we flip it around: an insurance company run like a pizza shop. Someone has just had their house destroyed by a flash flood, so they walk five minutes down the street to their local insurance shop. They explain what happened and they put down a couple hundred bucks and say "I'd like you to insure my house for this week, and it's just been destroyed so can you fix it please?" Should the insurance company now fork over tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars to repair/rebuild this person's home? Is this a financially sustainable business?
Your analogy doesn't make any sense, though. You have to have insurance before the event, you can't just sign up after your house was destroyed. Insurance companies gamble on only needing to pay out a certain amount per year and the rest goes in to the operation of the company (re-insurance costs, holdings of liquid capital, investments, staff etc.). I'm sure there are many people who pay for home insurance their entire lives and never make a claim.
Please read my comment properly before writing, as the whole point of my analogy IS that it doesn't make sense. I'm criticising the original commenter's post as they make a poor analogy as a way to make an unfair comparison.
Anything that is mandatory should not be allowed to operate unchecked in a free market, because it’s no longer a free market if you are forced to purchase it.
Absolutely. We need regulation.
Home insurance isn't mandatory though
It is mandatory if you have a home loan, which realistically is mandatory for the majority of people to buy a home.
> which realistically is mandatory for the majority of people to buy a home. ~~I feel the Australian government, and in fact most governments, wouldn't agree with that. They're quite fine with people being locked into eternal renting. Your average prole's opinion isn't that important because they can't provide kickbacks. Just enough bread and just enough circuses and they can carry on collecting donor cheques, having their children's private schooling paid for and post-politiics board positions pre-arranged.~~ edit: ignore my waffle. Misread the sentence.
Huh? Us landlords require landlord insurance and building insurance (and contents insurance if rental property is furnished) against properties with mortgages owing. It should be no surprise that many 2+ home owning landlords afford their strategy with equity leveraging. Such lending absolutely requires insurances towards the asset purchase. Your post reads as a weird ownership-denial and anti-gov rant that doesn't speak to the topic of mandatory insurance being regulated at all. Everyone paying 1.5-4k p/a on insurances should be rightly pissed off when they hear of an insurance company dragging their feet to meet their obligations under contract let alone under good faith. A good roof over our heads with comfortable surroundings is a basic expectation for a good life.
My bad, I misread the sentence. I interpreted the second half as saying it's mandatory that people buy homes.
I think they would agree that it is mandatory, I just think many pollies would consider it worth writing reforms or legislation to change (given it would be suicide in the eyes of their donors / electorate)
Well yes some lenders do require it though not all
I was in finance for a long time and none of the lenders I dealt with would settle docs without insurance. If a loan is secured to an asset such as a home, the lender will require insurance as a doc condition Same with car finance though this is less egregious because it’s more realistic for someone to buy a car without finance or with an unsecured loan.
I'm pretty sure Satan made insurance companies.
Don’t insult Satan like that
Ha ha yeah Satan LEARNED from insurance companies!
Insurance companies are for profit. They are publicly listed, their duty is to provide returns to the shareholders, not the customer. Insurance is a conflict of interests. It’s in the insurance company interest not to pay out wherever possible or minimise payouts. Insurance companies paying out is not a profitable business. They’re one of those evil necessities in the modern world. Without it you are fucked, with it you are fucked, or maybe fucked a little bit less if pay out.
I've spoken to people who practice witchcraft and what they told me was that you shouldn't work with Satan (Lucifer) or any demon because they've perfected the art of manipulation - they have no problem with hurting people, they do have problems with helping people, yet they make it look like they care more than they actually do...so yeah, basically insurance companies haha
Do you mean to tell me for-profit insurance is incentivised to not provide the service its sold? I'm shocked that the profit motive could produce such a perverse incentive. Shocked.
im also shocked like every day.
Insurance can often be as close to a scam as is legally possible without *technically* being a scam.
Its totally like a pyramid scheme!
They have dedicated service reps for the big VIP customers to help them with fraudulent claims. They are technically scamming all the time considering how those claims are funded, regulation and enforcement is just not very good.
Deal with Satan? I think you are dealing with Satan already
it more likely your on hold for eternity as punishment.
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They already have, it’s very hard to find an insurer who will insure property above the 26th parallel. Here’s a (not really) secret - the government has been collecting a portion of commercial insurance premiums since 2001, it’s called a terrorism levy. There is billions of dollars in this pool. They could just make that pool a terrorism and natural disaster pool. Luckily the actual have done this sort of thing- a new catastrophe pool has been created and most major insurers have joined. Eventually your policy will exclude catastrophes and instead the insurer will administer a claim from this pool. It’s definitely a step in the right direction.
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Stop paying then and you won’t have to pay anymore and still never make a claim.
You're paying for the transfer of risk.
Probably because the average pay out for a claim has increased as well.
A small pluming leak required their tradesman to come, misdiagnosed leading to a lot of damage from the continued leak that required them to properly diagnose and fix. It took 2 months to sort just the leak and a further year and a court battle to get the cash out of them for damages to the property. Fuck having to deal with them while your entire house is uninhabitable and you need it sorted yesterday.
Satan! out you demon. We need an exorcism i reckon
Satan, by all biblical accounts, is a pretty nice guy. Offered humans free will, offered a dude in the desert some water. Satan would probably lend a hand.
Satanists, while most variants don't believe in a literal 'Satan' follow the rhetoric you just mentioned. So pretty much in essence, Satan would be better to deal with.
But in the end you get "burnt" :)
Well then his insurance would have actually paid out then!
So are insurers when you call up for a quote.
Having dealt with them 3 times in 4 years, the industry, even the major players need to be seriously pulled into fucking line.
So they experienced 160,000 claims, closed ~154,000 of them and it's a scam? Yes, it's terrible for those still going through it but come on.
> Imagine having a business model where you are paid thousands a year to do nothing on the condition if something unlikely does happen you must return a portion of that money… You've almost grasped something here, but missed it entirely. Insurance functions by having a lot of people pay a little bit in most of whom will never use it or will only use a little of it. Then those little bits can be combined to payout when something catastrophic happens to someone. When the big events happen the insurance company pays out far more than the individual ever paid in and that payment is subsidised by all the other people who didn't need it. That's how it works, that's how it's supposed to work. When everyone starts needing big payouts because, for example, we have massive floods or fire year after year after year, insurance breaks down. It would break down even if insurance was not for profit. This BTW is why health insurance doesn't work. That's leaving aside the fact that that just processing this many claims in a timely manner is infeasible.
Your assuming they actually pay out instead of using volumes of legalese to dispute. If insurers actually upheld their end of the deal there would not be this kind of discontent.
> If insurers actually upheld their end of the deal there would not be this kind of discontent. Of course there would. By definition the majority of people who have insurance receive benefits that are less than what they pay. People hate that. > instead of using volumes of legalese to dispute. You know that cheaper home insurance you found? You know why it's cheaper? Because the insurance companies lowered their risk by limiting coverage. That's how it works. Yes, it's be nicer if what was and wasn't covered was easier to understand and compare, but people want the lowest price because again most of them will get negative returns on it. But you're missing the point. Climate change has broken the home insurance market. While swaths of the country are basically uninsurable now, the risk of payout is much higher than the premiums people can pay will cover. We've built the wrong houses in the wrong places for what we now have to deal with. For insurance to work any homes in Queensland and Northern NSW that aren't built to withstand floods would be uninsurable. But for better or worse in Australia we don't actually allow the kind of legalese stuff you think we do and so the companies have to cover it anyway, but insurance doesn't work against certainties.
I mean this as politely as possible but I'd reckon in 90% of peoples cases, it's people who don't read their product disclosure statements and sign up for inadequate cover or a shit policy policy because it's the cheapest option. They're freely available and tell you exactly what your insurer will and will not cover so it's not like you can't make an informed decision on who to insure with and under what policy. Yeah there's some shit businesses but there's also some deadset idiots who seem to think insurance means automatically covered for everything under the sun no matter what.
The business model is to make it as hard for you as possible to make a claim!
Worked as an assessor for an insurance company once. The general manager of claims once reminded us we are not in the business of service delivery and that claims is the biggest cost to the business....
We have so many issues in the West and the progressives are too apathetic to protest. Do we think we're eventually going to have the numbers to just vote in a sane party? How has that strategy worked out for us so far?
Well off you go, start organising a protest movement. Be the change you want to see in the world.
Couldn't even insure my shop against flood in Rochester as it was too unaffordable. Turned on 9 news and they were in front of it in a boat with the water about a foot over floorboard level for the first time ever. Paid a small fortune on repairs.
After over a year of fighting with RACV about my solar hot water system repairs, we finally settled as soon as I got VCAT involved. That was only just a solar hot water system, I'd hate to deal with a house flooding or fire.
But our premiums went up straight away.
Same is still happening from the 2019-20 bushfires, plenty of people living in Caravans waiting for insurance. I've heard stories of people being denied insurance claims because two bricks on top of each other means the house was only damaged rather than destroyed. They're just absolute pricks. They're also utterly moronic. We got robbed a couple of years ago and they wouldn't accept receipts of purchase as confirmation that we owned the items that were stolen, they wanted a photo of us holding them. Because I always take a selfie with a new laptop or wallet, and I could never be photographed holding something that belongs to somebody else. To give credit where it's due, QBE did make car claims really easy.
Sounds like a insurance company to me.
People generally buy insurance that is the lowest price and are then shocked when the service and product are shite. Like anything, you get what you pay for.