Insurance seems to be a big deal in America. The inurance industry makes sure that you understand the consequences of NOT having an insurance (any kind). But seriously, what did people do before the notion of insurance was even conceived?
The insurance industry wants you to have insurance on at least three of the following:
- life
- car
- health
- home owner’s (or renter’s)
- business
- property
- travel
I am sure I am leaving out a lot more. But the fact is, you don’t really know if that insurance you are paying big bucks for is useful until the day you actually use it. And in America, insurance is sure as hell not cheap. Take for example, health insurance. I paid $500+ a month for Grace and myself at my last job. And that’s after the company paid for half of my own insurance (here’s the math: $125 [me] + $375[Grace]).
In all fairness, hospital visits in the United States are expensive. Having insurance (plus copays) dramatically cuts down the cost those visits would other wise incur on typical visits (just a regular check up costs roughly $700 per visit depending on your doctor, an expensive proposition compared to $25 or so of copyments with healthcare insurance). And that’s not including shots, outpatient visits, toxic waste disposal charges (something like $20 to dispose your saliva, or that needle head the nurse used to poke your arm with).
It’s all a vicious cycle, really. The health insurance wouldn’t be so expensive if the doctor’s visits weren’t so expensive. The doctor’s visits wouldn’t be so expensive if they didn’t have to cough up so much money on their medical (read:malpractice) insurance. And medical/malpractice insurance premiums wouldn’t be so high if there weren’t so many malpractice lawsuits and that if the rewards to those lawsuits werent’ so high (sometimes in millions of dollars). That’s the healthcare industry.
Now apply similar logic to the other insurance types, except maybe replace “lawsuits” with something more relevant, like, highly paid skill workers (in the case of auto shops).
Whoever said insurance is for the rainy days probably didn’t expect the insurance company to give you the round-arounds when you call them. I have had the unfortunate “blessing” to test almost every one of companies I have insured with thus far. And clearly, all insurance companies are not created equal.
For car insurance in the California San Francisco Bay Area, I personally would avoid insuring with Mercury Insurance or Century 21, who make themselves known for saving their customers most money. Yeah, but at what cost? With Mercury, we have had to deal with rude and inefficient case agents in such a way that I even started an Excel spreadsheet to keep track of call logs so that I could later have proof on just how awful its agents were. As for Century 21, it was also pretty taxing on the time and efforts it took to communicate with them. Just the constant repeat of information call after call. It gets to your nerves about the 3rd time you are asked exactly the same question to which you already gave very detailed answers to two times before. I had to do that several times with both companies. It made me feel they were extremely disorganized. Granted each case agent has more than a few cases to handle at any given time, but there’s no excuse in not calling your customers back when you promised to, or that you don’t keep your customers in the loop on what’s going on with your case if more than a couple of days have lapsed. Common sense.
In contrast, when I had to call on Progressive back in Savannah, Georgia for my car problems, they responded immediately. The general feeling was that my case agent was ALWAYS ahead of me on every aspect of my case. I couldn’t vouch that for Mercury or Century 21. The lesson is, cheaper is not always better. Being cheap could cost you more in the end.
Shopping for insurance, especially car insurance, can also be a pain. Companies like Progressive makes the process a little simpler by offering cross-company comparisons for you right from their website. When we had to change insurance companies, Grace called almost all the places and finally narrowed down to between All State and AAA — both very reputable companies. We ended up going with AAA because of the extra perks we get for being AAA members.