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Thursday, 22 October 2009
Mandatory medical examinations for buying insurance
The Government wants mandatory medical examinations for those intending to purchase personal, life or medical insurance. This follows complaints of non-payment of medical bills by insurance companies in certain claim cases.
Your views please.
Source: The Star
Labels: Underwriting
About Me
- Name: Teh Loo Hai
- Location: Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
Loo Hai is an actuarial recruiter cum actuarial consultant. He has over 20 years of work experience gained in Malaysia and Australia in the actuarial, insurance, takaful and pension fields.
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3 Comments:
Not going to work and does not address the root of the issue.
My experience with some of these insurance companies (which are quite established already), the claim procedure is not transparent and there's no proper system setup by these Insurers to allow the clients to monitor the claim status. The duration of paying a claim is also not standardized amongst the industry, making it difficult for the policyholders to know if their claims has been 'taken for a ride' by the Company.
I suggest that the claim process and procedures be improved first for the life insurance industry, whereby policyholders are able to hold these insurance companies responsible for every delay in claim payments. Also, this will easily allow policyholders to choose which company they should give their business to when they decide to buy their next insurnace policy.
Making medical examination definitely only adds to administrative load of the Insurers, agents as well as the clients. The only party I see that could benefit from this move would be the doctors, who would suddenly see a rise of revenue from performing medical examinations. And what happens next when we have doctors competing for this pool of new business?
Also, if medical examiniations is requird for Personal Accident policies, this mandatory blanket policy doesn't sound very practical either.
Medical examination should stick to a case-by-case basis.
This is another case where the Government is approaching the problem from the wrong perspective. The health of the policyholders are not the sole reason most claims are rejected. Not sure if this new policy also address the issue of partial payment and delay in payment of claims.
LIAM, PIAM and MTA should advocate to the Jabatan Pendaftaran Negara (NRIC) to have the medical history of all Malaysian deposited in a Central Depository so that the medical history and records of a person is accessible for both medical treatments and insurance acquisition purposes via MyKad. Question of ethics and confidentiality may be overcome of such records to be only accessible by the Chief Medical Officer (who must be a medically qualified person) of the insurer or takaful operator. By having the medical information of a person on his/her MyKad could also save his/her life in the event of emergency treatments such as his/her blood group, allergies, major impairments, consent to donate his/her oragns etc. Malaysia has reached that level of ICT sophistication and maturity for such processes and procedures to be implemented for the citizens' well being and consumerism efficacy. This should also overcome anti-selection and adverse selection. From my past experience of having headed one of the largest insurer's Claims Department for 6 years; lack of the medical history of the insured is a major reason for the inability of the insurer to settle the claims in the shortest time; now that most insurers have expertise or access to expertise in pathology, etiology, histopathology, pharmacology and diagnostic sciences; access to the medical records would assist considerably in expeditious claims settlement.
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